


Doves in the Desert Dark

by furiedheart



Category: Chris Hemsworth - Fandom, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Affection, Anal Sex, Blood, Cowboy!Chris, Depression, Drinking, Fainting, Fluff, Forced Prostitution, Frottage, Gambling, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Intimidation, Kissing, Knife Wounds, Knives, M/M, Manipulation, Rimming, Sadness, Smoking, burial, gunshot to the head, intimidating loved ones, leaving a loved one behind to escape, medical examination without full consent, non-con, physical beating, powerful horse sidekick, prostitute!Tom, violent death of parents mentioned in flashback, western territories, wild west imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:53:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 55,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5654836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furiedheart/pseuds/furiedheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom loses his parents in a desert ambush and is forced into prostitution in repayment to the person who saved him. Chris is a cowboy with a criminal past seeking invisibility in a small western town. </p><p>"If you view the desert as an opponent, you will lose. No one defeats the desert. No one should try."<br/>~Chris Bohjalian, The Sandcastle Girls</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dead Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a tumblr prompt by [jordimeryle](http://jordimeryle.tumblr.com/). I know this was a long time coming, but I'm very pleased to present you with what I was able to write for your prompt. I hope you like it. You've been so patient. Thank you! *hugs*
> 
> **WARNING**  
> There is one scene of non-consensual sexual intercourse, followed by several vague descriptions of non-consensual sexual intercourse. None of the violence and non-con occurs between Tom and Chris. There is forced prostitution and violence in this story, murder and blood. Please be advised. 
> 
> [This](http://half-ancient.tumblr.com/post/103202537038/hembear-deactivated20150215-chris-hemsworth-by) and [this](http://half-ancient.tumblr.com/post/103040274968/haveahiddles-goddammit-chris) is Chris. [This](https://38.media.tumblr.com/13eea4c87da3eacae190d51562d23e62/tumblr_mxylpo6MOc1t1oo4go1_500.gif) and [this](http://half-ancient.tumblr.com/post/100670220268) is Tom. 
> 
> Beta'd by the wonderful [duskyhuedladysatan](http://duskyhuedladysatan.tumblr.com/). ilysm.

There was grit in his hair, sand sparking between his teeth. He was unclean.

He couldn’t remember how far he’d walked, or when the blood splotches on his neck and chest had dried and flaked off, looking now like stained oil and nothing more. Grime coated his skin, smudged around his eyes as he squinted and sweated and tried not to die.

But maybe he should die. Maybe he deserved it, when they had not.

Because the memory of huddling under the creaking wagon as his parents were slaughtered, the steady drip of sticky blood through the wooden boards, his father’s body thrown to the hard ground just feet from him, it all froze him in terror and made him so very aware of his breathing chest and pumping heart while theirs would no longer.

Lips cracked, throat hoarse, the desert a yawning mouth ready to devour him, he was ready to submit.

Glass eyes. He couldn’t be rid of them, the way his father had stared so blindly at him, gutted belly, his mother perhaps worse. They were gone now. And he hadn’t even been able to bury them. He’d kept them out of the sun at least, dragging their bodies under the wagon where his father had shoved him so roughly - _keep quiet now_ \- and then later that horrifying half-scream before his mother’s throat was cut. Murdered just feet above him, their flailing limbs in broken snatches through the gaps in the wooden frame, dust and blood peppering down to mark his shame.

Lurching wagon, dead hearts. There was nothing like the whistling wind over vast desert sand and split earth to remind one of their crippling fear.

And now, feet aching, tripping through the brush, he saw neither serpents nor men and was grateful. Alone in the world, he felt the weight of his parents’ loss like a sack of stones on his shoulders, dragging him lower with every step he took farther and farther from their bodies. Hunched over, the sun swelling over the back of him, he wept until he no longer could, until his tears were streaks of dried salt on his burning face, crooked rivers revealing the softer rose of him.

There was nothing left, why shouldn’t he just collapse now and give in to the cracked ground of this desert, its ravishing sun, to the blinding blue of this sky? He had nothing to give, nothing to live for.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The road home was thousands of miles to the east, to the coast, to the paved streets and tall, fragrant trees, abundant green and moisture in the air. Here, everything was scarred with heat, with drought and dust, spindles and rolling weeds, with a heaviness that only cruel living could abide. He’d never make it back.

He couldn’t live cruelly. His was a mind for stone halls and bound parchment, for pressed suits and schools of thought. What was he doing here? Why hadn’t his father listened to mother, that there was nothing out west for them, that they had their life certified and well-cultivated by the sophistication of polite society? What was this wasteland to them?

But then, just as his knees were about to buckle, to sink down, a feast for carrion birds, his shoulder nicked the hard edge of a building, knocking him askew and sending his muddied thoughts spiraling. Stumbling, he blinked through the crust in his eyes, blurred and dusty, and saw the narrow alley leading to the main street of a town, roughshod buildings with the look of newness, the sap still bright. Men on horses rode by, women in bonnets and lacy parasols strolled at a slower pace, children squealing just behind. Was he dreaming? Had he already died?

His tongue ached for water, swollen and scratchy and big in his mouth, limbs trembling, vision waxing and waning like it did sometimes in his dreams. On the verge of collapse, he managed a few more faltering steps and found himself at the rickety boards of a pathway.

Eyes suddenly on him, many eyes. He cast his own down, words lost to him. Women shrank away in alarm, men stared with disgusted, threatening sneers. Sharp clarity flashed in his mind for a fraction of a second before his thirst blinded him to all sense of propriety.

“Please,” he mumbled. “Water.”

“Get on out of here, filthy beggar!”

“On with you!”

“Get!”

Something sharp and thin struck his shoulder, stinging through the dirtied weave of his shirt. Another lash sent him sprawling to the ground, a whimper caught in his throat, skin smarting.

“The nerve,” he heard whispered somewhere above him. “Approaching people of decent society.”

You are not, he thought fiercely, _decent_. They knew nothing of its meaning. But his head thudded on the wooden boards and he lost track of the speaker, body on fire, the sky merciless in its glare.

Lying there, breaths ragged, it all hurt so much, his heart a painful racket in his chest. But then a large shadow loomed over him, blocking the sun, staring down. The edge of a great skirt brushed his knuckles as the person bent down and touched his face with a lace gloved hand, tilted his chin up and then down, side to side, examining him.

“Hmm. You might just do then, won’t you?”

They were the rounded edges of a deeper voice, an older woman perhaps, dusky and slow, refined and clipped. He hadn’t the energy even to blink, sluggish of mind and spirit. Will gone, heart panicked and near death, he was ready to let go.

“Come along, then. You can carry him over to my establishment.”

Strong hands grabbed him up under his arms and he was hoisted into the air. Carried between two men, head lolling, he hadn’t a clue where he was being taken, his stomach cramping, throat swelling shut, his mind succumbing to a blissful blank canvas.


	2. Vulture and Steed

**Tom:**

Water lapped at his throat, slim hands working smooth cloths over him in slow, even arcs. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, his body scrubbed, his hair washed. Soft, feminine voices brushed his hearing, too low to catch anything. Gentle hands coaxed him to his feet, water sluicing down his form as they dried and guided him to a bed, holding him up on his dead legs. Glimpses of candlelight, dark red walls, lush purple sheets pinned across the ceiling like billowing waves. They oiled his limbs and massaged knots from his aching muscles, untangling his curls with a whale bone comb. Cool water flowed down his throat, grapes pressed onto his tongue, and he moaned, wanting more, a thousand more of everything.

And then suddenly the room was quiet, most of the candles low and burnt out. Tucked under heavy blankets, he burrowed deeper into the velvet sheets and was ready to fall back into oblivion when a laced finger stroked his brow.

Consciousness snapping tight, he started and roused. “Mama?”

The person beside him stiffened, finger yanked back as if it had been scalded, a short sniff of ill-contained surprise. It took him a moment to realize it was a woman, the same woman whose deep purple skirts he’d spied as he lay out on the street like a gutter rat.

A low chuckle resonated through the room, drawing him further round. He rolled to an elbow and felt his nakedness under the sheets. Curling his legs up to his chest, he stared up at her and waited.

A tall and imposing woman she was, brown hair elegantly gathered in a twist on her head, long-sleeved gown of purple satin and black lace buttoned high on her throat, she stood straight-backed and very still, green eyes sharp and shining on him.

“Are you simple?”

He swallowed, his thirst flaring once more. Still, he managed a whisper. “No.”

“What is your name?”

“Thomas, ma’am.”

A smirk. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Are you diseased?”

“What?”

“My girls examined you but found no sign of infection. A good thing.”

He didn’t know how to answer, imagining girls peering into his slack mouth, separating his eyelids or looking between his toes, gazes drifting over him in search of whatever disease this woman feared he might carry. His parents hadn’t been ill since they’d begun their journey, and they hadn’t met any travelers who had taken ill either. But Tom hadn’t properly eaten in days, and all manner of vicious diseases seemed to take people at their weakest and most vulnerable states. Surely this is what these girls had been searching for on his person. And yet, the image of them spreading him, lifting his cock, bringing low his foreskin leapt into his head. Heat flamed over his face, never having really touched even himself in such a manner, never thoroughly at least.

“You are quite a beauty, I must say,” the woman continued, “under all that grime.” Her eyes traced a soft line down his chest and over the thin curve of his shoulders. He curled the sheets higher on himself and she smiled again. “I almost left you lying there, as filthy as you were. But with such a petite, slim bone structure, that lovely nose, not to mention that hair and your golden lashes, well, I simply couldn’t. Are you feeling better from before? You were near death. I have saved you.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Thank you. I can’t ever repay you for your kindness.” But with the dark air in the room and her gaze penetrating past the film of decency other folks knew not to cross, he strained his eyes looking for an exit and found none. A terrible unease settled low in his gut.

“Oh, little darling,” she said, laced hands folding demurely over the silver vulture’s head of a parasol. “Repayment is of no matter. It will be a simple thing, you’ll find, all instinct.”

Her words confused him, became matted together in his mind, too tangled to make out. Where was he?

“Now,” she said, her voice taking on a tone he remembered from when his father used to talk business and would order him out of the room. “What’s happened to you.”

In very simple words, he told her of the greatest tragedy of his life, traveling out west with his parents, their wagon overrun, their things stolen, his parents murdered right before him. She cocked her shoulders and stared off to the side. “Yes, well. Ruffians are all the trouble around these parts. No one’s been untouched by their savagery.” So easily dismissed was his sadness. “So you were raised back east, then? A cultured boy.” She hummed, appraising him with a new eye, calculating.

He didn’t answer, just looked down at the sheets, a dark cream, like pus.

“The road to these uncivilized, western territories is not an easy one. Your parents should have been more cautious, toting around a gem like yourself. Don’t they know what a young boy like you will incite in others?”

More words that didn’t click, more things he didn’t know. What was she talking about? Why wouldn’t she speak plainly?

“I was lost,” he said. “Where am I?”

“You’ve stumbled on Silver Dam. You can guess what is mined here. And I’ll admit that we are still a growing little boomtown, but there are lots of men here, men ready to work or gamble or drink themselves to an early death with their earnings, both legal and otherwise. Lured here by the prospects of easy fortune and a law-less living. It hardly matters to me, for men are the most predictable beings on this earth.” She bent low and he got his first good look at her. There were streaks of fine silver in her hair, combed elegantly and to a fashion, small lines of age around her eyes. But the rest of her was smooth and unblemished, the smallest hint of rouge on her cheeks and purple powder above her delicately curled lashes. Her nose was straight and lovely, and her full lips were tainted with creamy red paste, a blushing frame for her straight, slightly yellowing teeth. Still beautiful, still terrifying. “Do you know what men want, little one?”

He shook his head, not entirely confident in his own sense of manhood at his early age. He was small and slight and hadn’t garnered the attention of many girls back home. He was confident that would change as he grew older, that he would fill out and grow taller and catch the eye of a suitable lady companion, someone respectable, who would please his mother. At the eve of his eighteenth birthday he was to be prepared for initiation into his father’s insurance company, having resigned himself to a boring life of paperwork and stubborn clientele, a comfortable, affluent existence nevertheless. Adamant that he could expand his business in the wide-open, growing western territories, his father had packed them up and left the relative luxury his wife and son enjoyed. But his birthday, that first footstep on the path to his adult life, was still a year away. Only now it would never happen.

He shook his head again, and the woman straightened.

“They want their drink, and they want their pleasure. And I provide both, with the added bonus of privacy. This is my establishment, hard earned after years of cultivating a niche for myself in these vulgar lands where petty atrocities and cheap insurrections are frequent. My girls, however, are not cheap, my place is not filthy, and the patrons pay highly for what I provide. Now, I’ve had a couple of fellas who request a different kind of pleasure, slighter things, just like yourself. And that is where you come in.”

He swallowed around his growing fear, realizing quite suddenly what this woman might expect of him.

“M-me? But I’m a boy.”

Turning on her heel, she started a slow march toward a door he’d not seen hidden in the recessed shadows of this bedroom. She smiled at him just before turning the crystal knob, shiny teeth sharp in the lamplight. “A boy. Precisely.”

**Chris:**

The sun out west was a mean and nasty thing, a snarling cur that bit and burned you with fangs made of fire. It was an unkind affection the sun held for you, possessive and unapologetic. You couldn’t escape it. It would find you, always. Thing about the west Chris loved the most, however, was the heat of these sands, a rippling blanket licking around the stained spurs of his boots. The way it followed him snug and tight, beaming around the brim of his hat, casting the land in glimmering yellow. His horse, Bullet, was also a nasty beast who thrived in the heat when other horses would flounder. Joke around these parts was that Bullet was a descendant from a fiery Hell Steed, eyes flaming red, giant hooves cracking on the ground, long black mane silky and dotted with brambles. He was a mercurial giant, affectionate with Chris and most women but often violently defensive around other men and their horses.

Unless a mare was in heat, then God help the mare.

Ever since Chris had found him behind a barn on an abandoned farm somewhere east of Kansas City, struggling to breathe in a deep quagmire that had formed after several devastating thunderstorms, Bullet had been his faithful companion, tailing after him for a half mile, snorting with exhaustion as lightning and danger-black clouds spread on the horizon before Chris finally accepted that the animal was his now, to the end. Good with following Chris’s voice and the slightest turn of his hand or heel, Bullet would push and push to get Chris where he needed to be, underbelly frothy with sweat, escaping from or to a place already tingling with rumors of him.

The bloodied outlaw, the deadliest gunslinger since Jonny Lyon.

And maybe they were right, Chris thought, nicking the hammer of his Remington with a blunted thumbnail, a habit since he was fifteen. Snorting impatiently beneath him, Bullet kept stock still as Chris surveyed the valley, at the center of which were the dotted heads of a couple dozen buildings. He would be known here too, even without having ever set foot in its streets. Blood and flame followed at his heels, but not always at Chris’s choosing. Sometimes trouble liked to find him well ahead of itself.

**

Silver Dam was like any other mining boomtown, still growing, buildings constructed almost overnight, any semblance of law struggling to keep up with the rampage of strident crime and the free thoroughfare of manifest destiny. Strike silver and become richer than you ever imagined, with the high chance of losing it all in the next blink. Such were the trivial fortunes of men who thought to beat the gods at their own game. But it didn’t work that way. Dice and cards were entertaining, yes, but steel was the only way to determine victory, pistols and blades his trade and weapons of choice.

Chris held the reins loose in both hands, a thin cigarette hanging from his lips. Bullet’s ears were pressed flat, but he was always angry around other people. A calm rub on his muscled neck placated him easily enough, tossing his head in mild tolerance, and Chris chuckled, muttering out an affectionate curse. He got a quick feel for the town, Chinese immigrants clustered on one end, canvases strung from rooftop to rooftop, creating a patchwork tent that kept the sunlight dim, like jewels in a mirage. The rich elite, so few of them, had their own corner of the town, the buildings tall and freshly painted, with imported jungle plants skewered deep into the earth of their backyards, fragrant fertilizer dug into parched desert sands to keep them alive.

Such luxury, Chris scoffed. And for what? They should have stayed back east if they didn’t want what the desert truly had to offer.

Guiding Bullet through the main street, he greeted no one and abided all the staring in silence. Eyes narrowed from the glare, he kept his hat low, feeling the heavy quiet in the air as he maneuvered to the stables, people hurrying out of his path, speaking amongst each other in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Chris ignored them, trotting past the small lot where a one-room school was being built. The other horses in the stables began to immediately nicker and whinny nervously at Bullet’s scent, no doubt edged in brimstone. The stable boy hopped off a high wooden fence and approached Chris, a flimsy hat doing a poor job of keeping the sun off his face.

“I need a stable,” Chris said, climbing off. “And he needs water and a quick brushing.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll see to it right away.” He took Bullet’s reins with a crooked grin, no fear for the beast evident on his face. Bullet rolled one black and red eye at the boy and then sniffed loudly before turning back to the stables, where the heads of several horses were poking cautiously out of their enclosures, staring back at him. Chris pulled out a dollar bill from his front pocket and the boy’s face lit up.

“You’ll take good care of him, and there’s another dollar when I come back.”

“Yes, sir! Absolutely! Pa has a couple of stables separated from the rest. I’ll put him in one of those. He’s making the others jumpy.”

They turned to the other horses, who were stomping the soft ground uneasily, a quiet, thrumming energy building among them.

Chris nodded. “Good. I’ll be back in a bit.”

He watched the boy guide Bullet away, dwarfed by the giant horse, talking friendly to him as if Bullet would understand. Chris felt alright by the kid, softened by the kindness he showed the animals under his care. Others in this town, like any other town, wouldn’t be nearly so transparent in their inherent humanity. He’d learned that himself at a young age.

The honest ones were quickly gone, dead or wise enough to leave, sometimes trapped, which was worse. All the rest, well, Chris could tell their kind a mile away.

Which is why pretending was the smartest game around.


	3. Darks Rooms and Massacre

**Tom:**

Her name was Madame Adelaide, and she was terrifying.

All the other girls fawned and worshipped her, but Tom could tell it was only out of fear. He’d heard rumors in the weeks after she rescued him – and thus secured his indentured servitude – rumors of girls who had displeased her, became diseased, girls who spoke out or showed defiance, a will to live lives all their own.

They disappeared, a candle snuffed out in the dark, their beds cleared of old sheets and replaced with new, fresh ones. A new girl would be found soon enough, washed and oiled as Tom had been, thrown into service as soon as the Madame witnessed their first bleeding. Pregnant doves held no worth to her, unless requested by the men, which was probably infrequent. Too much trouble to wait for the telling belly when that man might be dead the very next afternoon, a boiling slug in his gut.

Tom had no ability to bleed, but the Madame kept him close by her side regardless. She petted his hair and corrected his posture with a wooden ruler, one time smacking his knuckles when she caught him biting at his nails.

“Do you not think that disgusting little creatures won’t spill down your throat and grow worms inside you? And then where do you think they’ll crawl out of?”

He’d been violently ill after that, every itch and tingle on his skin a disgusting creature invading his space. Crouched over the toilet in the private latrine used only by the girls, and now him, he’d become damp and clammy, falling back on his heels and weeping so quietly, desperate for his mother. His entire life had been tossed up in a whirlwind, chained to this woman whose moods switched as easily as the searing desert winds. She was polite and calm with customers in the main parlor when Tom spied on her from the upper balconies of the saloon she ran, walking among them with her vulture-head parasol, her girls paraded in front of the men, sometimes topless, with tassels dangling from their bouncy breasts.

He didn’t know how he could possibly do anything of the sort, but the Madame had been steadily grooming him into the idea. And it wasn’t really an idea, rather an unspoken truth, a command. His repayment for his salvation.

And then there were the moments when her face was as dark as a storm cloud, all tight lips and delicately furrowed brows. She wouldn’t scream and she wouldn’t strike, but it was all in the low timbre of her voice that kept Tom and the girls in careful check. Because no matter the details of their work for her, she still provided a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, keeping them clean and relatively safe, apart from the times they spent in private with the men. Sometimes the girls came back with black eyes or hand marks around their throats, their hips and wrists bruised darkly. Tom watched as the others would gather around the injured girl and smooth oils on her skin or press bundles of ice – a luxury in this oppressive wilderness of heat and sand. Tom would hang back at the edges of their circle, wanting to be of comfort, unsure if he would be rejected.

But one of the girls, Evangeline, took hold of his elbow one day and quietly asked for a basket of cloths from the upstairs linen closet, and just like that they began speaking to him. They never approached the Madam about these cruel incidents with the men, but Tom could tell by the hard set to their jaws that it bothered the girls greatly, and he began to see why some might have chosen to defy her at the risk of certain banishment. What happened that made them disappear?

Did she have them killed? Dragged out into the desert to fend for themselves? Gifted to the last customer to have touched them, however cruel and merciless he may be? Sold to other houses with worse reputations? Because it was more than obvious that she owned them, each and every one, that each in some way owed her a terrible debt, and belonged to her for as long as she found them useful.

Tom was too afraid to even contemplate what other brutalities of which the Madame was capable, content enough to be welcomed by the other girls, who petted his hair and snuggled with him in bed, sometimes three or four of them wrapped tightly beside him. In all, he’d counted two dozen girls, bunking in doubles and triples, taking shifts with entertaining the men. Their private bedrooms were on the third floor, where they could rest and keep themselves clean. The ‘dark rooms’, as Evangeline called them, were on the second floor, and they were always occupied, day and night, the girls leading the paying customers into their shadowy recesses and coming out minutes, sometimes hours later, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed. But the tears they left for later, in the soft embraces of their fellow sisters, where they could finally shutter open their grief and weep for their ruined hearts.

Tom was instructed by the Madame to help prepare the rooms for the next guests.

“Don’t change the sheets unless you absolutely have to. Too much white –,” here she shrugged and tapped her vulture-head parasol to the scraped wooden frame of the bed. “—or red, will taint the experience for the next person. If not stained, leave the sheets and simply reposition the spread. Fluff the pillows. Refill the oil in the lamps. Light incense if the scent is too disturbing. And be gone before you hear the creak on the stairs. If you’re not, I can’t help what any of the men might do to you before you are ready.”

He wasn't sure why the Madame hadn't yet thrown him into the fray of steel-toting wolves that frequented her establishment, with their stench and dusty clothes, beady eyes soaking in the girls’ nakedness under wide-brimmed hats, cigar smoke floating to the rafters like miniature clouds of doom. Not to mention the many weapons they carried, guns and blades and whips, or just their great big hands, scarred from wars and fights, were enough to inflict terrible damage. But he had a suspicion she was simply waiting for the evidence of his desert sojourn to be gone from his body. His feet had blistered terribly, his nose and lips peeled of their delicate skin, the back of his neck red as a lobster. But as the days passed he grew better, his thirst and bellyaches calming, his skin new and soft and pale as ever. A new dusting of sprinkles decorated his shoulders, and he touched them sometimes at night, remembering.

She inspected him every morning, ordering that he bathe and oil himself, instructing the girls to begin dressing him in lace and silks, little slips of gowns with generous skirts that still left most of his chest and arms exposed. He would have to wear these garments all day and suffer her sharp but silent scrutiny, knowing she was measuring how he looked against what her patrons wanted of a boy like him.

It would be soon, he knew it.

“What will they do to me?” he asked Evangeline one night when they were curled up in bed together. She had him squeezed to her chest, his head resting on the swell of her bosom, stroking his hair as the other girls breathed deeply, shifting in their sleep.

“They will hurt you,” she whispered, words quavering with certainty. “They might make you feel things you like, good things, pleasant things. But they will be fleeting. They only service themselves, in the end. But you come right back to us, yes? You come to us and we will make you better.”

It unsettled him, how young Evangeline looked and how old her mind seemed. What had this place done to her? At what age had the Madame taken her in? Such pasts were not often brought up among the girls, and Tom took it as a cue not to ask.

Apart from following the Madame whenever she wasn’t in the open room of the main floor, where tables were spread out for the patrons to gamble, Tom cleaned the rooms and helped prepare meals. There was a hallway set apart from the main paths in the building, a skeletal length of space where the girls and the Madame’s kitchen staff came and went out of sight from the clients. Tom had sought refuge more than once in that dusty, low-ceilinged track, the thin walls doing nothing to mute the bursts of crude laughter and lively organ music. The saloon was open day and night, and he wasn’t sure when the Madame slept, finding her entertaining her guests at all hours. Her dresses, always covered with a dark layer of lace, were of all colors imaginable, just as fine as some of the gowns he’d seen back east. Once, he spied her on the wide porch just outside the entrance to her building, a tiny cigarette in a slim gold holder held delicately to her lips. She wore dark circle sunshades and was watching the horde of townspeople make their way up and down the main street of town. Her lips, when not pursed around the cigarette, were snarled just barely. He’d never seen a woman before bare her true emotions so starkly.

Tom would have run away many nights ago if it wasn’t for presence of the Madame’s hired men, six lean cowboys with stars for spurs and guns half-cocked in their holsters. They weren’t allowed to touch any of the girls, and by extension Tom, but he never allowed for even the slightest opportunity, fleeing by them on his way up the stairs or skirting the ovens in the kitchens where they ate. They would let him pass, chuckling shortly around lit cigarettes, hats sweat-stained, obscuring their eyes.

The Madame certainly made plenty of money to keep them on as hired guns, but Tom always wondered why she didn’t move on to bigger cities growing along the coast, take her business somewhere it might grow and wasn’t at risk of disaster should the mines go dry and Silver Dam become a ghost town. San Francisco held great promise after the gold rush of 1850, Tom remembered his father mentioning, or even San Diego, all still new to the Union following the war with the Mexicans. With all that water and immense hold on land, California seemed the ripest chance for opportunity and fortune. But when he’d found the courage to mention this to her, posing his question about why she stayed, the Madame only smiled and brushed around him with her bulbous skirts.

“I am tied to this land, Thomas. If Silver Dam goes under, it won’t be for fault of my establishment. If anything, it’s because of me that this little place survives, should the mines go dark.”

It was true that there were other saloons in town, a good spot of easy rivalry that the Madame won with her options of girls. Hers was easily the most popular venue, drawing to it all manner of society. There were drunkards and gentlemen alike, seated rather severely apart, but with liquor and cigar smoke to assuage tender egos, most days and nights went by with few fights.

Tom took it as a positive sign – for the Madame, not himself – that a school and fledgling bank were being built on the side where the stables were. Most of the streets even had rudimentary signs with names, Florence Street, Sage Corner, Boothill Turn. Of course no town could be complete without a graveyard, a plot of land toward the west where crooked headstones rose from the parched earth. There was even a semblance of post, mail wheeled in months after it had been sent, but arriving nevertheless. It was with mild jealousy that Tom watched as some girls received letters from family elsewhere who believed they were teachers and dressmakers and wives raising children.

It was a generally sad thing to witness.

When the time came, inevitable as the sun setting each day, Madame summoned Tom to her bedroom on the third floor. This was the same room he had woken up in after she’d saved him, dark cloths paneling the walls, a low-hanging crystal chandelier, a canopy bed with a deep crimson spread. He hadn’t set foot inside since then, and now took care to peek around at every detail he could spy in the midday gloom.

“Come here, Thomas. Are you hungry?”

On principle, she fed her girls very little, wanting them lean but curvy enough to be attractive. Tom’s bodily composition had always been slight, _delicate_ he heard his father say one time to his mother when they thought he’d gone to sleep. But he was hungry, and often, yet knew not to ask for more than what he was given.

He gave her a short nod, and whispered, “Yes, Madame, thank you.”

She smiled and motioned him to sit across from her. She lit a cigarette.

“That’s a lovely tone of voice you have. Keep it low when you are with the men, whispery. They like that.”

Tom kept his head down, taking a single grape and rolling it between his palms.

“And there,” she said, blowing smoke to the side. “Your chin tilted low, your eyes looking up at them through your lashes. They want a boy who acts like a girl. Do you understand?”

He didn’t, at least not entirely. He was seventeen and had no experience with the opposite sex, much less with the same. And even though he had often caught himself staring after gentlemen friends of his father’s, distinguished in their crisp suits and assured voices, focused on the dark hairs on the backs of their hands, the curve of their ears, the twinkle in their eyes when they laughed gaily, he certainly had no time to contemplate any such emotions that might have sprung up at instances like those. Men who wanted boys who were like girls?

“No, Madame,” he finally whispered, and she smirked slightly, letting her gaze rake down his form. The lace dresses she’d ordered he wear were disturbingly comfortable, free flowing around his legs, the soft material grazing his skin at night when cocooned with the girls. But they made him feel terribly exposed, and he felt a pang in his spirit at the plight all women faced when their bodies were gauged for worth rather than their minds, what they held dearly in their hearts.

Surreptitiously, he tugged the dress higher on his shoulders, but his chest and neck were glaring in the dim light she kept, his long collarbones jumping with every breath.

“The men ask different things of my girls. Some like for them to be crude and rough in their speech, goading and, well, _spirited_. Others prefer the taciturn tumble of a rag doll, no talking, no noise, just to simply lie there and take it.” She bit out the last two words and Tom couldn’t help his flinch. There was an animalistic shine to her eyes, almost pleased with the notion, and he bent over his food to avoid looking at her. The fruit was fresh, as was the meat, even if the bread was slightly stale. He still ate as much as he could while being decent.

“What they will expect of you might be a combination of things, but I know for sure they’ll prefer you docile, quiet, gaspy.” She shrugged, as if none of those words weren’t making his cheeks burn. “Submissive. Which you are. I can tell. And maybe with the right man, you wouldn’t mind a good fucking, but these are paying customers and you’ll do right by them. All of them.” Puff of smoke, eyes gleaming on him. “Won’t you.”

Her language scandalized him. He’d never heard a woman speak so bluntly. Still, it was apparent he couldn’t cross her, none of the girls could, because she got her way no matter what. Otherwise you were remembered only by a suddenly empty bed and whispers in the dark, of where you were, what might have happened to you.

She tapped her cigarette on an elephant ashtray and leveled him a cool gaze. “I have several men who have shown interest in someone like you. Tomorrow, be ready.”

Lifting a hand in a quick wave, she dismissed him. Lurching to his feet, Tom hurried out the door and ran down the hall to the toilet, hunching over it as bread and crushed grapes rushed up his throat.

**Chris:**

There was a room available close enough to the stables that Chris felt comfortable renting out. The closer he was to Bullet the more at ease he’d sleep at night. The woman was an older Mexican matron, with sharp, astute eyes and lines of age radiating out from her puckered mouth. She didn’t ask his name and he didn’t give it, but he figured she spoke more Spanish than English. There was a bed and a rickety table with a cracked porcelain bowl he could fill with water to wash his face and hands, which he did immediately. Checking the grimy window, he surveyed the street below, watched as wagons and men on horses traveled left and right, others strolling along the planks on either side of the path. Women in hoop skirts and dainty parasols puffed along at a reasonable gait, make-believe sophistication in the terrible wild west.

Already, he’d heard rumors about himself circulating. His arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed, but Silver Dam had less of a structured semblance of maturity that other towns and cities didn’t lack. Law enforcement was more of an ideal philosophy, law and enforcement not exactly a priority just yet. It was true that there was a school being built and a rickety, neglected excuse for a fire station – and even a makeshift jailhouse that was more a shed than anything else, no sheriff or deputy to man it much less fill it with criminals like him – but certain parts of the west, like this one, relied on the respect earned from a cultivated reputation, good or bad. Traveling thespians, singers, rich philanthropists with aging hearts, these people were left well enough alone for the sake of entertainment and free money. Others, the rogue cowboys and thieves and murderers, the shifty prospectors with questionable morals and motives and even more questionable land deeds, were the ones no one bothered for their bloody and shady pasts.

For lack of trying, Chris was one of them.

The Cold Creek Massacre was something he wasn’t proud of, but he did nothing to discredit the rumors – some true, some false – about his involvement. Him against a dozen men, defending the honor of a friend, he’d proven himself to be cold and cutthroat, the fastest shooter in recent times. But his friend had lived and was now home again in northern Mexico. That’s all Chris cared about. The coinciding pros and cons of being a person of ill-repute were that he was generally left alone, or sometimes approached by others who felt they had something to prove. Citizens with sudden spouts of goodwill who might wish to be the source of the imprisonment of rogue men like himself. Chris wasn’t shy on his gun. He used it often, and never missed, but people were made of something stubborn, something stupid, and he would continue proving them wrong for as long as he needed. It had been his lot in life to do so.

Silver Dam was his last effort to remain in the Union. If he could settle here, remain relatively out of trouble until the heat was off his back, he would keep low and quiet before moving on to more profitable or established localities. Otherwise, it would be south of the border for him. His friend had a ranch he could work on, maybe even find someone to keep him warm at night. Maybe not. Staying home was what he wanted, anywhere in these hot lands, anywhere would do.

Slipping off his boots, sliding his pistol under the pillow, Chris lay back on the bed and slowly drowned out the signs of life around him – creaking bed springs next door, a shout in Chinese from the street below, a gunshot and bubbling, maniacal laughter from the roof.

He would need a drink soon, and wondered what was offered in the saloons in these parts, and whether trouble would find him there.


	4. Searing Sting and Whiskey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This is the chapter where the non-con begins. There is one detailed scene, followed by vague descriptions of other non-con encounters for the duration of the story. Please be advised**

“I can’t,” he whispered, tears burning hotly under his lashes.

“You can,” Evangeline insisted, quietly, the dark pressing in on them. There was no one else in the room that night, the other girls servicing men on the second floor, or spread out in the other vacant bedrooms. It was only he and her on the bed, clutched in a tight embrace Tom normally would have considered to be erotic, but he didn’t feel any attraction toward his friend, or any of the other girls. Was the Madame right in her assessment of him? Was he really geared toward the touch of men? Had his father somehow suspected, whispering about him to Tom’s mother, as if concerned?

It was too much to figure and Tom’s current worries were too glaring to consider anything else.

“It will hurt,” he said wetly, his tears smearing on her chest. “How can anything…fit? There?”

She sighed and cupped a palm over his skull. “It’s possible. It is. They take us there too, sometimes. Feels differently, I suppose, for them. But listen to me, Tom.” She took his head in both hands and forced him to meet her eyes. His sobs shook his entire frame, lashes heavy with dripping tears, but he sniffed and curled his fists into her soft cotton gown.

“You will be just fine,” she said fiercely. “They will touch you but they can never claim you. You hear me? Not until you will it. Not until you are ready. Your heart is yours, they can never have it. They can use your body but can’t get that deep inside your soul, where you live, that tender space that’s only yours. Do you believe me?’

He nodded, trying to remember the steel in her voice for when he needed it most. “What will they want me to do?”

Here she shrugged and relaxed back against the pillows. “They might want your mouth on them, licking them like a summer’s treat. You’ll need to play make-believe, Tom. But don’t be too excited or enthusiastic. From what the Madame has told me, you should be docile and pure, which you are. My darling.” She caressed his cheek and lay a kiss on his forehead. “They will want to stick themselves inside you. I can help you prepare, if you’d like. There’s oil we use sometimes to ease their violation. We often are not ready when they are, and so the oil helps. We spread it on ourselves, under our skirts, before we meet with them. They wouldn’t wait otherwise.”

“Prepare?”

Her brows puckered, as if sensing just then how lost he was, how very much he would be hurt. “Yes,” she whispered. “With the oil, you can prepare yourself beforehand. With your fingers.” She took his hand and pressed their palms together, his long fingers curling over the tops of her own, dwarfing them.

“You are porcelain, Tom.” Her gaze dropped to the sheets. “You should not be made to do this.”

Rising suddenly, she ran from the bed, her bare feet padding on the smooth wooden floors like pale wisps of light. At the door she turned. Tom watched her with a clenched heart, missing her terribly. “We are kept butterflies here. Strung along in a loose net. If we beat our wings too hard, rise up where we deserve to be, we are suffocated. Do you understand?”

Gulping around bile, he nodded and whispered yes. Eyes glistening, she dropped her chin in small acknowledgment and fled into the barren hallway.

**

Procuring for him a small vial of oil, Evangeline guided Tom into the upstairs latrine and in quick whispers explained what had to be done. Scarlet up to his hairline, Tom bathed in the scarred wooden basin, dumping water over his head, scrubbing his hair and under his arms, down between his legs, and then a bit further. He’d never considered how very warm he was there, and the thought that another man would feel that, and be possibly cruel about it, set his teeth on edge. Sitting on the bench by the basin, he let himself dry slowly, the beads of water trickling down his arms and chest, dripping from his curls. Skin pebbled, fingers slicking over his thighs nervously, Tom considered where his life had brought him. Not even of age yet to officially take over his own father’s business, a moot point, he couldn’t begin to fathom what it would mean to lie with a man. Certainly in his old life it wouldn’t be an option, unless he began to entertain the vague, shapeless feelings he had when around his father’s friends, or men on the street climbing in and out of carriages, their movements drawing his eye to places his father would be ashamed he paid attention to.

And yet, now that Evangeline had put a word to what he needed to do – _stretch_ – Tom was determined to do it. Wiping the last drops of water from his face and smoothing a hand over his hair to rid it of more damp, he stood and uncapped the vial of oil. Touching himself was something he’d done rarely and with muted alarm, glancing at his bedroom door every other second, half expectant that his parents would barge in and demand to know what he was doing. He’d undoubtedly never touched himself here, he thought, reaching back and fingering between his cheeks, never considered it would be important. A tingling spread under his fingertips and he eased in the first fingertip.

He winced, unused to the sensation.

The oil helped immeasurably as he stood with one leg propped on the wooden bench, angling his hips back and pushing deeper. First one finger, and then another, he began panting, working his wrist until it started to ache. Briefly, he reflected what something heavier, longer, thicker would feel like inside him, and smiled faintly as his core started to thrum.

“Tom?”

He snatched his hand up, stumbling back on both feet. Trying to keep his voice from wavering, he said, “Yes?”

It was Evangeline. “The Madame has summoned you. I think you have a customer.”

Well, then. He hung his head and nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. “I’ll be right out, Eve.”

Her voice soft, “Alright, Tom.”

It was all a terrible blur after that. He was dried and slathered in cream, his skin slicked and soft. Curls fluffed with sweet smelling oil, a dress of lace pulled up his slim hips, sleeves falling off his shoulders.

“You’re beautiful,” Evangeline said. “I heard the Madame negotiating for you. The man is paying three times what he pays for us. She can’t afford you be damaged. Do you understand?”

He understood quite clearly what she meant, and felt little comfort for it. _You’re worth too much._

Rather than walk around the main parlor downstairs, as all the girls did before leading their men to the second floor, Tom was told to wait in one of the Dark Rooms. He had expected the Madame to say something to him before, some words of encouragement or direction, but he’d seen not even a vanishing swish of her skirts and he knew it wouldn’t have fallen into her line of character to do so. He was happy to have had Evangeline’s company before it all, if only for a short while.

The room’s walls had rich cloth paper of purple and gold. A single brass bed with deep burgundy sheets, a small matching settee perched in the corner, and a table on spindle legs with an oil lamp was all the furniture it held. Despite the Madame’s efforts to convey luxury, Tom could tell the furniture was worn down, the bed dipping near the middle, the sofa’s arms thinned out and a tad shabby. Curiously, none of the dark rooms had windows, and he wondered if it had to do with the space allowed for the secret hallway he and the girls and house staff used to get around without disturbing the patrons in the main parlor.

He was just about to sit when the door opened suddenly and a tall silhouette walked in. The light from the single oil lamp sent a soft luminescence meant to encourage feelings of romance that were often missing, and it wasn’t nearly enough light to gauge who the man was, or what he might look like. It was all shifting shadows under the wide brim of his hat, spurs jangling as he closed the door behind him and stepped closer.

Tom’s breath caught in his throat, tugging the sleeves of his dress higher on his shoulders, fidgeting where he stood, but he was still so frightfully exposed, his bare skin dragging the man’s eyes down his chest to where the edge of lace just barely covered his nipples, tickling him. Stopping just before him, the man was only slightly taller than Tom, but might as well have been as big as the ceiling. Tom wouldn’t cower, he wouldn’t edge away. If this man paid for him it was because he was interested in him, and this might go well.

Swallowing back his original fear, he focused on the smile beginning to smear over the man’s lips and reached with both hands to hold his arms, angling his face up to kiss him – his very first. But the man snatched both wrists and sneered.

“Turn around, little slut.”

The blood drained from Tom’s face as he was forcefully spun, catching himself on the bed with both hands. His skirt was flipped up and cool air gusted up his bare legs, over the curve of his bottom. Face on fire, tears sprang to his eyes as hands dry and rough took hold of his hips, a cruel grip, a hard squeeze.

“She drives a hard bargain for you, that flaming bitch. But I see it was worth the price. You’re a precious thing, aren’t you? You’ll be good and quiet?” His voice had that twang that Tom was still unaccustomed to, most people back east speaking colloquially in more clipped tones, nothing nearly so curved and drawn out.

Mute with fear, he winced when the man thrust his thumb down the wet crevice of his bottom, the oil from earlier still smooth on him.

“All wet for me, yeah? Good boy.”

The loud clink from a belt buckle made a whine slip from his lips, and he bit down stubbornly, not wanting to encourage the man. But when the man’s dusty trousers thumped to the floor, Tom’s legs started shaking, no matter his efforts to remain distanced. Fingers clawed into the sheets, he was ready to bolt over the bed and scream and scrape at the wall to escape when something warm and big flopped lazily against him.

It was the man’s penis, he realized, his stomach rising threateningly to his throat. Before he could even draw another breath to brace himself, the man shoved himself into Tom, full head and entire length, the burn devastating. Choking on a scream, lurching forward from the thrust, Tom felt split in two, his core swollen and torn. Grunting and grabbing at him, the man fucked into him like a dog, his clothes rasping on his soft skin, dirtying him. Tom’s feet slid on the floor, his grip lost under the man’s determined strength. Hunching over him, the man breathed hotly at his ear, tongue sticking out to lick at the delicate shell. Disgust raged through Tom and he jerked his head to the side with a small cry of protest, but the man yanked on his hair, twisting his neck to the side. Gasping in pain, Tom held still as filthy curses were breathed on his chin, on his throat, hairy balls slapping against him. Skin crawling, arms trembling, the pain at his entrance only grew sharper the harder the man pushed into him, and he hoped with all his might that this would be over soon, that the man would get his pleasure from him and leave.

With another solid push, he was flung flat on the bed, face pressed into the musty sheets, feet flipped helplessly in the air. With a grip in his hair still, the man held Tom’s head back, neck arched up to the ceiling as he snapped into him, the bed creaking and shifting, adding to the scuffs on the floor. Teeth clenched, feet flipping helplessly over the edge of the mattress, Tom started a slow count to a hundred, and when he reached that high number, he added a hundred more. Before long, the man’s hip movements grew frantic and Tom had the sudden glaring realization that he would spew his seed into him like he would any other woman.

Propping himself up on both palms, Tom tried to struggle, kicking his legs to throw the man off but the man only growled and pulled out of him quickly.

The sudden loss of him was painful, a throbbing settling deep inside him, a searing sting that reminded him of torn and bloody knees. But tangled up in his dress, which was ripped at one sleeve so that it hung nearly to his navel, he couldn’t stop as the man took both wrists and tossed him carelessly onto his back, a wide hand flat on his heaving chest, pinning him.

“Hold still, little slut. And open your mouth.”

There it was, his wet-slicked cock pumped by his free hand, crawling up his body to straddle Tom. The swollen head, bulbous and enflamed, was mere inches from his face and Tom’s entire body recoiled at the thought of swallowing this stranger’s seed.

“Open it! Go on.” His growl made Tom clench shut, eyes, legs, mouth. Angling his head away with another pitiful whine, more tears escaped as his hair was wrenched once more and the man slapped him open-palmed, wet from his own body, a loud, hard smack. Voice frozen, the stinging pain was immediate, a terrible truth about the world gnawing into his heart as the man resumed working his cock and then groaned obscenely above him. Hot ribbons of fluid flicked over Tom’s burning cheek and the long line of his neck, globs of it that seeped over his skin like runny milk.

And then the weight was off him and he was left sprawled on the crumpled bedspread, shaking with fury and disbelief and hot, hot shame.

“I like a little fight, but careful with it, boy. Others might be less kind than I.” Smiling as if he’d just given Tom amazing advice, the man buckled himself up and promptly gave Tom’s big toe a little squeeze, a disturbingly affectionate gesture that twisted his stomach into a knot. He snatched his leg away, the man’s laughter echoing as he left the room, not even bothering to close the door behind him. Turning from the column of muted light falling in from the hallway, Tom curled up on his side and covered his face with both hands, his tears finally falling as he sobbed and heaved in the dirty light.

**

Later, after closing his ears to the distant laughter and chatter from the parlor downstairs, the smoke wafting up in tendrils that singed his nose and burned dry his tears, Tom felt a soft hand on his arm, a softer voice just above him, his name.

Evangeline guided him from the dark room and up the stairs to the third floor landing. He couldn’t hide his limp, hobbling along beside her, the ache in his tailbone deep and insistent. With an arm around his shoulders, and a hand holding his own, Evangeline drew him a bath and helped ease him into the wooden basin. Without speaking, she scrubbed his shoulders and chest, and then very gently wiped the crusted remains of the man’s spend from his cheek. Tom’s tears had slowed but his sadness lay heavily on his brow, his lashes wet and spiraled wildly, chest jumping with short inhaled sobs.

“How is he?” he heard the Madame ask Evangeline in the hall. There was as much concern in her voice as a rancher would have querying about his cattle. Door cracked just enough, Tom lay curled in the tub, pressure building up in his head as he tried not to hear.

Evangeline, out of sight, kept her tone clipped. “He’s torn.”

“Badly?”

“He can’t take another. Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

There was a pause, and Tom imagined Evangeline cast her eyes down to hide her frown. “Two days, perhaps. He’s new at this. He needs some time.”

“Fine. Two days to recover. But don’t think I’m affording him any sympathy. You girls accept your purposes, he should begin to as well. Makes life easier for all of us.”

Before he could hear another word, Tom curled over his middle and sank under the water, the loud rushing volume of it flooding his ears and swallowing him whole.

**Chris:**

The place was called The Sapphire Raven, and it was scandalously owned by a woman. Story was she’d moved out west over a decade ago, fleeing a dying husband who had left her a dwindling fortune. What money she had left she invested in the saloon he now stood in front of. A towering building of three storeys, it was recently painted a burnished brown, like copper. There were no windows along the east end of the building, but any visible from the street were shaded.

Women and liquor, what anyone would need to turn a successful profit.

Flicking his cigarette to the ground, Chris walked up the steps to the cool shade of a wide porch. Festive organ music and laughter and the unmistakable clinking of glass on glass could be heard from inside, but if it wasn’t for the mystery of the woman Chris would have preferred one of the quieter saloons closer to where he was bunking.

Brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling, casting the entire parlor in pockets of golden haze. The bar was at the back wall, with tables for pool and poker just before it. Smaller tables were interspersed throughout, chairs occupied by men in business suits or worn dungarees, guns and walking sticks interchangeable in this crowd. Scantily clad women walked about the room, snatched up at random by men who would deposit money into their small, long-nailed hands. Chris watched as the women led the men up a side staircase viewed by all to the second floor, disappearing into an interior hallway. There was a third floor, with a wrap-around balcony, but the stairwell to it was inaccessible to patrons.

“Whiskey,” he told the barkeep, angling his hat low, his coin clinking hollowly on the wooden bartop. He paid the barman for a second shot and soon found himself at a poker table, cards pressed to his belly. The men eyed him cautiously enough, as they would any new addition to their table, but Chris kept with the silence that helped guard against curious shit-starters, and the game continued without interruption. Ever since he was a little boy, he loved games with cards, sitting at the kitchen table with his old man and counting out the decks. Picking up poker and faro was an easy thing when you studied your opponent long enough, learned all of his ticks.

Taking a sip of the whiskey, he flicked his gaze up at the staircase and felt his heart speed up as he caught sight of a specter.

There, climbing down from the third floor, in the close embrace of a young woman, was what looked like a boy.

A very pretty boy. With golden curls and a flushed complexion. He wore a dress of lace and seemed to be unsteady on his feet, leaning heavily on the girl. She guided him into the second story hallway and they disappeared from sight. Keeping his expression clear, Chris took his turn and ordered another drink. The girl walked out on her own and found the eyes of a man down on the parlor floor, nodding at him surreptitiously before climbing the stairs again. The boy was nowhere to be seen.

A thin man with a gun holster and a stained Stetson left his game of pool and sauntered up the stairs to the same hallway the girl had led the boy into. Chris counted the minutes, twenty-two, before the man appeared again. He lit a cigarette, hands shaking, and downed an amber drink at the bar, laughing with the barman. There were two fresh scratch marks on his neck. The girl didn’t come down the stairs again, and after a few hours passed, Chris imagined there was another way to get to and from the first, second, and third floor landings. Parading the boy out the front, sneaking him off out the back, it all smelled like shoddy advertisement.

Remembering his lilted gait, his heavy lean into the girl, Chris wondered if the boy was drugged, inebriate with powders or liquor. Or was he just exhausted, in pain? After not spying him again, Chris quickly collected his earned cash and went in search of some food. The woman from whom he rented a room huffed at him after he tracked her down with a purple and gold parasol he bought from a lily-skinned woman at a shop along Main Street, but he caught the smile she tried to hide as she led him into the kitchen, where stew was cooking and bread was baking.


	5. Brink and Shot

**Tom:**

There were several more men, but he wasn’t sure exactly how many. Each was entirely different from the other, and all terribly the same. Tall, short, fat, thin, Tom paid attention to none of it. Eyes open, he froze his gaze on the ceiling, or the wall, or the edge of the mattress vibrating from their movements. The stench of some of the men was more difficult to ignore, his stomach roiling from the bitter sweat and burned tobacco and tang of dirty animals as they heaved and grunted over him. Most liked to take him on his hands and knees, some preferred to rut wildly between his legs. Some liked to spank him, and he would give small involuntary cries that spurred them on. Others liked to choke him, big hands circled around his neck as he rocked under them, legs flailing uselessly. And then there were the men who tried tugging on his limp cock, urging him to spill as they had, but he couldn’t – he couldn’t, he couldn’t.

The majority avoided kissing save for a few who – to his immense horror – tried ducking down to catch his lips in their pleasurable throes. He adamantly refused to comply, turning his head to the side, his cheeks and jaw and neck peppered with ill-received affection.

He would never kiss anyone again, nor try to. The first rejection had been unbearable.

Most of the men were of insignificant size, a blessing, the ache and sting of it less than the rare ones that showed up with bigger cocks. He always prepared himself with oil, leaving smears of it on him even though he was loose more often than not. Where before his days had felt structured around his assistance with the girls and the upkeep of the establishment, he realized, rather grimly, that he was something of a bright star in the Madame’s black sky of greed. She allowed him rest after every coupling, days he spent dozing in his and Evangeline’s bed. The shock of penetration made him sweat the first few times, and he would lay feverish while Evangeline pressed cold compresses to his forehead, smoothing his hair, telling him how wonderfully he did. But he could hear the anger in her voice, just barely suppressed, as she tried to revive him from fogged delirium of the Madame’s cruelty.

But then the Madame would summon him once more, eyes shining with an insatiability for money Tom had trouble understanding. Then again, he hardly remembered a time when he understood anything at all.

He was sure he wouldn’t survive. One of these days they would kill him. One squeeze too hard round the neck, one slap too strong, a gun aimed at him sooner or later. But for all his customers’ efforts, Tom was a miserable heap under their attention, tears clogged in his throat until after each man had left and he could finally sob through his pain. In the bath later on, after Evangeline would retrieve him through the back staircase and check him for mortal wounds, he would count the new bruises on his skin, the dark and mottled ones, the green ones soon to reappear, the ones invisible as of yet, only the bone-deep ache of violent grips. Even so, as one week turned into two and three and four, he would catch glimpses of the saloon and see the spoils of his despair.

The chandeliers were brighter, all the crystal pieces cleaned, the splintered ones replaced. Newer, intricate liquor bottles at the bar, the sofas and mattresses exchanged, new wallpaper plastered to the rooms. He slept through it all, eating only what Evangeline brought to his lips, soups and fruit and soft breads. But his bruised throat and sore jaw – and tender tailbone – made him cower from anything heavier.

“You must drink water,” she urged quietly, holding a flask to his mouth. And he would drink, emerging from the mist in his mind only long enough to blink at her and see the mild horror on her face. What did she see on him that scared her so? His pale lips? His hollow eyes? His lost will to live? She kept close to him during his days of rest, the crucial hours after being used by yet another man. He could feel her eyes on him from the cracks in the doorway. Sometimes she would come straight to him after servicing a man, smelling of sex and tobacco and stale perfume. Crouching at his side, smoothing his brow, murmuring to him with small encouraging smiles, she would bring him back to the brink of his former self. Nuzzling each other, giggling as she described this man’s back hair or that man’s missing toe, Tom would remember what it felt to have a heart.

“You coddle him,” the Madame said one night Evangeline left their room. Tom was slipping onto the warm spot left by her body, caught once more in the in-between of eavesdropping and not caring.

“I’m just protecting your investment,” Evangeline replied with just enough curtness in her voice that told Tom she was playing at the Madame’s ego, telling her what she wanted to hear. “We wouldn’t want him throwing himself out the window. In his current state, he’s on a delicate precipice.”

“Delicate simpleton, more like,” the Madame replied, sniffing at the doorway.

“He’s doing fine at this rate. Any more men and you’ll wear him thin. His body is still strong, but his mind is tortured. And then added to all this? He has no one, and we ask him for all he has.”

“Don’t get soft on me, Evangeline. You were my first girl. You’ve been here the longest. You know the rules of this game.” Her voice had gone deadly low, and Tom strained to hear every word.

“I only know because of you,” Evangeline said quietly, a mean edge to her words. “Because of you, I can’t leave this game. You, who should have _torn me out_ —.”

The sudden slap made Tom flinch, the smack of palm to cheek no doubt flinging Eve’s head around. A rustling, and then more hard words.

“You listen to me, you ungrateful little bitch,” the Madame snarled, still elegant in all her anger. “One night of opening my legs like you girls do for my customers left me thrown out in the streets when you started growing inside me stronger than I wanted. I _should_ have torn you out, gone on with my life. Lord help me that I didn’t. And if it wasn’t for that slit between your legs, you’d have rotted in the bloody slime you arrived in. I made the best of the sad pile that old goat left me, here in this hell’s hole on Satan’s doorstep. This desert is all we have, Evangeline. This establishment is all we have. Do you understand? So be a good, sweet daughter and fuck the men like I ask and keep quiet about one more sweet, unfortunate darling who’s stumbled his way into our eternal debt.”

Eve’s tears were quiet and shuddering, her voice one octave higher. “Then why do you throw out those of us who get with child? Why are you so cruel?”

Another rustle of skirts, the Madame sounding more collected. “I made it, Evangeline. They can make it too. I am but weeding out the weak ones. The world can’t blame me for that.” Quiet footsteps down the hall, the Madame walking away, her parasol tapping the soft rug. “Compose yourself, Evangeline. And see to it that he’s ready tomorrow.”

Eve’s sniffles quieted after a moment before she too left, and Tom, knees squeezed together, covered his eyes with shaking fingers and prayed the sun would never rise.

**Chris:**

She was a tough nut, that much he could figure. After making himself a frequent visitor at Sapphire Raven he’d spotted the owner several times walking among her patrons, speaking to them softly, smiling, a generous host. He kept anticipating that she might approach their faro table, but she would skirt around them, heading to men he thought were very friendly with her, repeat customers probably. Judging by the smell of new paint and the shine of fresh lacquer on the cabinets at the bar and the staircase banisters, she was improving her establishment and drawing in new customers. Her girls were busier than ever, a continuous line of them going up and down the stairs. It did appear like the boss lady granted them some hours of reprieve, noticing a group of them switch out in shifts, new girls freshly bathed and painted, swaying their hips and sinking down onto the men’s laps, flirting openly for the shine of a silver dollar.

“Good day, sir,” he heard one afternoon, and glanced up from his hand to see the woman herself standing just behind him. She wore a golden dress covered in black lace, her eyes obscured by dark round spectacles. Hand clutched around the vulture’s head of a parasol, she smiled at him. “I haven’t seen you round here before these last few weeks. How is your luck faring?”

“So, so,” he said noncommittally, knowing her eyes were on the bulge of bills he had in his front pocket.             

“Have you been able to sample all of the services I offer here? Poker? Billiards? Top of the line liquor imported from the east. One or two from Europe.”

He hummed, flipping down a card. The men at the table groaned and tossed theirs down in defeat.

“And my women? Perhaps you’d like a chance at one of them?”

“Buying a woman has nothing to do with chance, ma’am. Money is exchanged, girl is paid for. That’s about all there is to it.”

“Then would you like to make a purchase? We have nearly every type of girl available. Gorgeous red hair, blond tresses, midnight blue in some light. I could bring a few out if you’d –.”

“I’ll find you,” he said, waving another game on. “I’d like to finish my whiskey just now.”

Her smile, while forced, was gracious. She nodded. “Of course, sir. Just speak to my men at the bar. Ask for Adelaide.”

She left and he watched under the brim of his hat as the boy with the lace dress, a different color this time, was brought down the stairs once more and guided into the dark hallway on the second floor landing. A man rose from the bar counter and loped up the stairs after him, staying for an hour, and then two. Stomach twisted in an uneasy knot, Chris pulled out of the game and quickly downed another shot before hurrying out into the bright glare of midday sunshine, not wanting to wait around to see just how long the boy would be put to use.

**

Sitting in Belen’s kitchen – she’d finally told him her name after clucking at him like a hen when he strode in smelling of smoke and liquor with not a bite in him – Chris couldn’t help but feel that something was terribly wrong with whatever was happening in the deeper layers of the Sapphire Raven. The girls seemed healthy enough, a little on the lean side, but smiling and laughing with the men who paid them for sex. But a woman’s heart was a thousand leagues deep, and they were artists at protecting their inner selves, doing what was necessary to survive. He didn’t blame them for it, but he couldn’t trust appearances for appearances’ sake either.

The boy was a different story, something irking him about the shuttered look on his face, even from the distance Chris sat. His feet dragged, his hand clenched hard around the girl’s, his body language screaming protest and haze. Judging by the money signs burning behind the Madame’s eyes, she would drive a hard bargain for the boy, but Chris had more than enough money. He could afford whatever price she named. The more he thought about it, the better he felt about the idea. Meeting the boy would put his mind at ease, this sudden and silly notion about the boy’s safety and wellbeing unnerving him into a sleepless night. Just as the sky was lightening from indigo to pale pink, Chris saddled up Bullet and took to the sands, gunning him hard through brush and nettles, the horse grunting through it, almost a deep giddy laugh, skidding to a halt at the edge of a steep gutted canyon. Watching the day break, Chris was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t better designed to fly, his immense love for the sun making his chest ache, so anchored to the earth.

The stable boy was happy to see him return, Chris usually giving him a dollar for every day he took care of his steed. Plus, it seemed Bullet had warmed up to the kid, sniffing at his hairline and munching almost lazily at the apples the boy kept in his pocket.

“Don’t get soft on me,” Chris whispered with a playful pat at the animal’s long neck, and Bullet gave his own hairline a sniff, biting at the air by his ear in warning.

In a few hours he would see the Madame about buying the boy with the lace dresses for the day, adding enough cash for food and water to be brought to their room. He would ease his conscience about the kid, hoping he was wrong about it all and would get a good fuck out of it in the end.


	6. Dainty Prince and Bargain

**Tom:**

It came to him in a dream. Escaping the Madame’s clutches would be fairly easy if he could manage to drag himself out of the terrible wasteland his mind had become. But sitting bolt upright in bed somewhere around midnight, Evangeline murmuring and tossing on the mattress beside him, he realized with sudden clarity that the hidden hallway was his best chance at saving himself. There was an exit to the alley behind the saloon, where garbage and kitchen slops were deposited and the servants met to fuck against the wall. If he managed to slip away while the Madame’s hired guns were at the bar and everyone thought he was sleeping, as he always was nowadays, he might be able to leave. His sluggish mind stumbled over the possibility – what were the risks, what were the risks? He would need to prepare a pack of food, a flask of water, an extra change of clothes.

Only, he didn’t have clothing for men anymore. His were only lace dresses and corsets, ribbons and hose for his legs. He hadn’t worn a pair of shoes since he stumbled into Silver Dam. He would have to run off wearing one of those skimpy slips or maybe his cotton nightgown, a gift from Evangeline’s own trunk of clothing, but the more he thought about it the more he knew with absolute certainty that dressed so inappropriately, feet and skin so bare, the desert would kill him.

And yet, it didn’t matter as much as he feared it would. Because although it was a terrifying and sobering thought, each day he survived another cruel coupling with a man who cared nothing for him but the holes on his body, Tom thought that death under the sun would be better than this pitiful existence. He had to steel himself, keep his plan even from Evangeline, his heart breaking every time he thought of leaving her.

“You heard,” she had said softly, after returning to him that night he found out she was the Madame’s daughter. Sitting up in bed, he nodded and stood to face her, but she turned to him with an expression akin to stone, her trembling chin the only indication of the war in her heart. “You must hate me.”

“No,” he said, reaching for her hand. She clung to it tightly, still holding back her usual affection.

“None of the other girls know. And I couldn’t tell you, Tom, least of all you. For who would want to admit to having such a mother?” She wiped at her tears, furious and quick. “She’s a bitter, malicious woman, and I’m her burden.”

“You are full of heroism,” he whispered in her ear, and her body started to shake from sobs. Clinging to each other, they rocked and breathed together, heads tucked against each other. “You are not a burden. She is yours. Understand? You saved me, Eve. More than she ever did. You have kept me on this earth with your kindness and your smiles, your soft, gentle touches. You are my only friend.”

“Oh, Tom,” she moaned, and they didn’t let each other go until the next morning, when their duties resumed.

If only it were possible that she could leave with him. And maybe she might. Two out in the desert faced better odds than one. After all she’d done for him, every kindness spent on him, Tom was loathe to abandon her. Surely she would leave her mother’s cruel care for a chance to live freely?

It was because of her that he had faltered for so long at his conviction that he must escape.

Her and the Madame.

There was a menace in her that flooded his bones with acid, filled him with a terror he hadn’t felt since the day his parents had been killed on a wagon creaking above him. She didn’t visit with him much after he started his repayment to her, confident perhaps in Evangeline’s care that he would survive each atrocious fuck by strange men. But watching her with the other girls, or with the patrons in the downstairs parlor, her ability to coerce with such easy contempt made him doubt his faith in the world where decent people scratched out lives for themselves, while someone like she, a viper, remorseless and single-minded, gained her riches off the abuse of his and the other girls’ bodies.

“Would you ever run with me?” he asked one night the wind howled at the window, whistling in through the vibrating glass panes. Eve had told him about the annual rains that came at the end of each summer, great thunderstorms that shook the ground and flooded the streets, lightning cracking across black skies roiling with giant doom clouds. They huddled together against the draft, noses inches apart, shivering in the cool, electric air.

“Run where, Tom?” she asked sleepily.

“Anywhere,” he stressed.

“It seems so impossible. That big wide world. All that land, its brambles and gorges, its spindled plants and creeping serpents. And you and me, two doves in the midst of it.”

He frowned, trying very hard not to pout. “When you say it like that, anything seems impossible.”

She laughed and pulled him close. “But I’ll tell you this, little darling. If you see your chance, you go. I won’t say a word if I find you gone. Hear me? You go, and don’t you worry about me. She won’t do anything to me except sell me, and that’s something I’ve been doing since I could bleed.”

It was late evening when Tom rose from his bed, limbs stiff and sore, neck ringed with bruises from horrible kisses and big hands. He was desperate for water, but Eve was in one of the dark rooms and wouldn’t be back for a while. Standing made his head spin, his inner thighs spiking with pain from strained muscles. Slowly gaining his feet, he trailed a hand along the wall to the doorway and cracked it open.

The hallway lamp sconces were lit and he stepped out lightly on aching legs, not wanting to be heard. He needed to pass by the Madame’s room to get to the back staircase that would lead to the kitchens, and just as he tiptoed across the hall, a servant came out of the shadowy doorway carrying a dinner tray. Deep in the dark recesses of glowing golden candlelight, he saw her, the Madame. Her hair was down, soft waves that rested over the curve of her breasts, her long-sleeved white nightgown accented with a rich velvet robe of a deep violet. Sitting at a table of dark oiled wood, she was eating a succulent fruit, juice coating her fingers and sticking to her chin. Green eyes flashing toward him, she inclined her head in acknowledgement and grinned, teeth stained blood-red from the pulp of the fruit.

Tom’s heart froze in fear, feet rooted to the plush rug lining the floor as he felt his very soul submerged in ice cold water.

But then the servant closed the door and he was shut out from her world, from her.

Spinning on his heel, he ran to the back stairwell and down to the kitchen, startling one of the cooks when he slammed through the door and collapsed against the wall, dragging in ragged breaths.

“Are you alright?” she asked, brows lifted to her hairline. He didn’t know how loyal this person was to the Madame, so he needed to guard his words.

“Fine,” he said, gulping. “I almost fell down the stairs, frightened myself half to death.”

“Dinner was two hours ago. Were you needing something?” She resumed pounding at the dough spread on the worktable. Tom hadn’t wanted to eat anything when Evangeline had brought him a tray, and now he cursed his stupidity. He would need to start hoarding some of the food that wouldn’t go to waste as quickly. Bread, fruits, nuts. And water.

“I was sleeping when Eve brought in our dinner. Can I bother you for water and some bread?”

“You’re the dainty prince, aren’t you? The Madame’s choice cow.” She shrugged and continued kneading. “The servants whisper about how you’re always sleeping. But if I fucked as much as you do, I’d want to sleep too. Aren’t bowlegged, are you?” She chuckled with all her teeth showing, reminding him of the Madame upstairs.

Eyes on his toes, Tom said nothing, his face burning.

“Alright, little lamb. Here – take this flask to keep water upstairs with you. You need refilling, just give it to one of the servants and I’ll send it right back up to you. And take this loaf. Fresh out of the oven.” He accepted the stoppered jug thrust in his direction as the cook scraped around inside the hot oven, the bundles of warm loaves making his mouth water. One was pressed to his chest as she bustled past him, its heat warming him through the thin nightgown.

“Want some fruit, too?”

“Yes, please,” he whispered, cradling the bread in his arms like a newborn.

Back in his room, he shoved the fruit and bread into a pillowcase and hid it under the bed, going still as he wondered if he shouldn’t leave that very night. It was as quiet as it would ever be, the Madame dressed for sleep in her room, Eve safe on the second floor. No one would suspect her in his disappearance if she was busy servicing one of the men. Nodding to himself, he dragged the pillowcase back out and searched for some of Eve’s thicker stockings and a long-sleeved camisole. He’d learned that the desert – the ornery, ancient thing – was brutally hot during the day and cripplingly cold at night, harsh winds stinging eyes and ears, drowning one in its fatal embrace. He hoped it would be enough to protect himself until he could find something more suitable.

Checking the hallway again, he tiptoed past the Madame’s doorway and down the hall to the back stairwell, trying not to trip on his way down, karma no doubt ready to punish him for his earlier lie. He waited a full minute by the ground floor exit, trying to hear where the Madame’s hired guns might be, but at this hour of the night they were probably at the bar, observing the remaining patrons still playing pool or faro. He heard no heavy footfalls or jingling spurs pacing outside the door. Taking a deep breath, he slipped out into the back alley, glancing left and right, the smell of rotting trash making him gag. But just around the corner was the wide street and beyond that his freedom. Breaking into a run, he ignored the pains and aches in his body, his tailbone throbbing. The dark buildings stood silent as he dashed past, their windows dark at this late hour. The alley was deserted and he careened around the corner into a shorter alley that led out into the main street. He was gasping on fresh, open air, the moon’s beams shining on him, infusing his skin with a speed he hadn’t thought possible after all he’d suffered.

The air was buzzing with a building storm, and he breathed deep and hard, lungs expanding as they hadn’t since he was a child whooping happily through the courtyard back home. Wheezing, he spun in place, the sky and earth rising to loom at him with their possibilities.

Skidding to a halt, he cocked his hear, listening. From his right came the curious nickering of horses. The stables.

His lips fell into an easy smile, something from his youth, a happiness. Maybe if he stole a horse—.

A gunshot rang loudly from behind him, pockmarking the sand at his feet. With a broken cry, he spun and fell clumsily to his knees, scrabbling to rise. His pack of stolen food and water rolled to the side.

Two of the Madame’s hired guns turned the corner from the main street just as another two stepped from the shadows around the corner from which he’d just ran. He realized with gutted horror that their spurs were muffled with cotton wrapping. Laughing at his panic from under their dusty hats, he felt a stab of hurt in his heart, that it would only ever be his fate to be dragged back into her hellhole.

One of them lifted his gun again and Tom bolted to the side, finding his balance and running toward a tall building leaning in over him. He caught sight, absurdly, of underclothes hanging out of one window to dry, the moonlight washing everything in pale white. But out of the darkness of a side alley came two more of her men, snatching at him as he tried to flee, their long arms wrapping around his waist and knees, rendering his legs useless. A wide hand clapped over his mouth, cutting his scream short, its echo ringing hollowly in the dark.

In the shifting breeze of sands, not a whisper from anyone, not a peep through a curtain, his kidnapping ignored or attributed to something eerie, maybe paranormal. Such were the superstitions of people in these parts, and his misery would continue for it. Smothered, he struggled in the arms of these hired thugs but his efforts were useless against their combined strength. Body exhausted from malnourishment and abuse, mind anguished at the taste of freedom so close but kept just out of his reach, he eventually went limp, body sagging in their tight grips as they sauntered back to the Madame’s saloon, up the back stairs and to her room.

In a matter of seconds, the glimpse of the moon was snatched from him.

“Tom!” he heard Evangeline gasp, her soft hand on his cheek before being ripped away, warned by one of the guns to stay back. Dumped on the Madame’s fine, plush rugs he didn’t bother trying to rise to gauge her reaction. He could hear her move off her bed where she’d been resting, his heart deflated with grief.

“What is this?” she said calmly, knotting her robe.

“Caught him trying to escape. Was as far as the Chinese quarter. By the stables.”

Her gaze on the top of his head felt like a stab of glass. “The stables,” she repeated, voice a whisper. “You would run from me?”

Swallowing around bile rising in his throat, Tom was suddenly wrenched up by the collar of his sleeping gown, surprise widening his eyes when he looked into the Madame’s frenzied eyes, her fists clutching him on his tiptoes. He clasped her wrists, gasping.

“You filthy cur. You bleeding _cunt_! After all I did for you. Housed you. Clothed you. Fed you. Saved you from death!” She shook him and he cried out in fear, trying to angle away from her. But she threw him back suddenly and he collapsed to the floor, dragged up again immediately by two of the hired guns. Hands hitched over his elbows, they held him upright as she pointed a long finger at him, anger making the vein at her temple pulse, her eyes aglow with hell fire. But words seem to flee her as her mouth twitched and snarled, spittle flying from between her teeth.

“Take him,” she finally said, turning away. “Hurt him, but don’t kill him. Understand? And nothing in his private areas.” Furious green eyes landed on him. “I need him to work.”

Legs wilted under him, Tom could only watch her as the men removed him from her room, staring directly at her in the hopes that she would remember him when the time came that she finally died, that he would haunt her even in that terrible darkness of death.

**

The beating was painful, but short. The men kept their hits to the middle of his body, shots to his belly and waist, kicks to his back, knuckles cracking on his jaw, splitting his lip and the skin of his brow and cheeks. Legs and arms pummeled, he couldn’t fight back, and was left on the ground in the alley out back, a disheveled heap of bloodied and torn cotton. When Evangeline found him she gave a loud cry and flew to his side. Eyes swollen shut, nose clotted with blood, he couldn’t see or smell her, but heard her tears above him, felt them splash in his hair.

The climb up the stairs was grueling and slow. With patient whispers she guided him up each step, supporting his weight, pausing with him when the pain was too much, when his gasps turned to strangled sobs and they needed to rest against the wall before trying again.

Despite the Madame’s threat of having him work after his beating, Tom wasn’t bothered for days. His face swelled, his torso turned a disquieting shade of purple, and his back muscles were so tight he couldn’t uncurl from his fetal position until several nights later, after Evangeline’s constant efforts to rub out the kinks with heated oil.

“She was angry with them,” she whispered in the dark, curled around his back. “They touched your face. She said she was very specific with them where they could…well.” She sighed and snuggled into him.

“She told them to avoid my private areas. Because it’s obvious that’s all of me that matters to her.”

“I’m so sorry she caught you, Tom. I feel responsible. I should have gone with you.” Voice deep and bereaved, she cradled him gently.

The tears slid hotly down the bridge of his nose, and he skimmed his hand down his belly to hold hers. “You’re the only person I trust. The only person I love. I can’t think of what she will do to you if she thought you knew.”

She sniffed out a short laugh. “She won’t do anything to me, Tom. She needs me. And she needs you. This was a warning. We need to heed it.”

Clutching her hand tighter, he kept his gaze on the fat outline of the bulbous moon through the gossamer lace of the window, wishing it was only a few feet away. He would hitch a rope to it and swing them away into the sky, away from the tragedy of their lives, away from her. But it was long passed such fantasies. He’d been given his chance, and it had withered to ash before he could fulfill it. He was hers now, entirely.

Maybe it was high time he accepted that.

**Chris:**

It was the gunshot that woke him, bolting upright in bed to hear a short scream, cut off by force. He’d heard the likes of those types of screams before and they’d never boded well, usually followed by death or disappearances. Hand already on his pistol, Chris was at the window in a flash, peering around the frame in time to catch the flick of a flailing arm on the street below before it was twisted away around the side of the building.

Jamming his boots on, not bothering to throw on his over shirt, Chris crept down the stairs and out the kitchen door, the stove still warm from Belen’s dinner. Outside, the street was empty, gusted with strong night-winds of sand and the creeping desert-cold. Whoever had fired that gun or made that terrified scream was gone. The only thing out of the ordinary was a small bundle lying crumpled on the ground. The moonlight wasn’t enough to see properly but he was able to catch signs of a struggle, bootprint gouges in the dirt. Scooping up the small bundle, he felt its weight and then carefully side-stepped into the alley and through the kitchen door, bolting it. Back in his room, he studied the sack and discovered it was a pillowcase, rich and soft with the letters _ANC_ embroidered in deep green along the seam.

“ANC?” he whispered, pulling out a loaf of bread, two apples, and a shiny flask of fluid. Sniffing at the rim, he sensed nothing and knew it to be water. Holding the soft material in his hands, letting it slink through his fingers, he had a curious wonder at the initials. Something this fine, the pillowcase had surely come from an affluent person, someone who could afford imported materials and professional stitching. Sitting in the dark, the gleam of his gun catching in the moonlight, Chris couldn’t help but think of the one person in town he knew whose name began with an ‘a’.

“Adelaide,” he said, staring out the window to the distant roofline of the Sapphire Raven, where a single window was illuminated, the room at the very top of everything.

**

He went early the next morning, after bathing in the rickety wooden basin Belen kept for guests. The water was lukewarm and the soap was only a sliver, but he scrubbed and scratched and made himself clean, his hair dripping onto his shoulders. Feeling better than he had in days, he belted his gun to his waist and sheathed a blade in his right boot, sliding on his hat last. A group of children ran past him on the street outside of Belen’s building, right over the area where he’d found the pillowcase with its measly scraps of food. The shifting winds had erased all signs of the struggle he had spotted the night before, but Chris kept moving as if nothing had distracted him. Lit cigarette between his lips, he caught the lingering gazes of several men, nodding at them as they hustled their women out of Chris’s path. Whether or not people recognized him for what he did at Cold Creek or were just fixated on the mystique of a new stranger, Chris appreciated when no one started a fuss over things they didn’t understand.

The saloon was as busy as always, girls working through the crowd, a line of them going up and down the stairs. He couldn’t see the Madame at first, so he approached the bartender.

“I need to speak to Adelaide.”

The man nodded and put down the glass he was wiping. He tapped the shoulder of a man with busted knuckles, leaning casually at the bar, watching the patrons. Cocking his head to listen to the barman’s whispers, the gunman didn’t acknowledge Chris, only straightened from his slouch and sauntered up to the third floor. It was several long minutes before the Madame appeared from a side door behind the bar, making Chris wonder once more at the passageways hidden from the patrons.

“Ah! If it isn’t our whiskey drinker,” she said, smiling. “How do you do, sir?”

“Fine,” Chris said agreeably.

Giving him a quick skim from head to toe, she tapped her parasol on the floor. “How can I help you today?”

“I wanted to solicit one of your—.”

“One of the girls?” she said, smiling widely, eyes beaming. “We can absolutely serve you today.”

“Actually, I want the boy.”

Something flickered across her face, and she hesitated. “The boy is…indisposed at the moment. Perhaps one of my girls would be—?”

“No,” Chris said curtly. “The boy, or nothing.” When she remained silent, he crossed his arms. “What’s his name?”

“Thomas. The girls call him Tom.”

“Let me know once Tom is better. I’d like to try him out.”

“I anticipate he will be available soon. My men will find you.”

“Won’t be necessary,” Chris said, angling toward the bar. “I’ll probably be right here.” The last thing he needed was this woman’s men scouring the town for him, finding where he bunked. She might already know, with all the rumors and news from town circling around her busy parlor, but Chris preferred not to draw attention if he could help it.

He felt her eyes on him as he joined a faro table, but blatantly ignored her after their exchange. There was something off about the woman, something decidedly too sharp about her person that other women lacked. He was happy he hadn’t gotten too close to her – he imagined she must smell like rotting flowers. And he was sure that stench had nothing to do with her chosen profession – it was something altogether more sinister than the flesh trade.

He wasn’t approached again until two days later. Antsy with suspense, he’d bathed and eaten what Belen put before him, but his thoughts were on Tom and what could be the matter with him that would keep him from seeing customers for so long. He stopped his imagination before it got the better of him. Surely he’d be able to tell once he got the boy alone.

He was five shots ahead, about to take a winning sixth in an easy game of pool when one of the Madame’s men approached him. Forgoing his final shot and setting a stack of bills on the edge of the table, Chris immediately hung up his cue stick and followed him up the stairs, striding purposely in an effort to conceal the apprehension that had taken up in his gut.

“Third door on the left,” he was told, shown into a cool, dark hallway. He nodded his thanks and followed the patterned rug. From within the other rooms he heard the sounds of fucking, loud fleshy smacks, small feminine cries, grunts that sounded like hogs. Painted a somber lavender, the third door was closed, but just as he was going to lift a hand to knock the rustle of skirts drew his eye to another door at the end of the passage.

The Madame and her vulture’s head parasol.

“Payment up front.”

“How much.”

She named her price and he thought the sum a little high for a single hour, but she was the only proprietor offering this particular specialty, so she could charge whatever she liked. He fished out the bills and counted them out, handing them to her without a word. She nodded and promptly left.

Glancing back at the crystal knob, Chris wondered if the boy had heard everything, how much she thought he was worth. Taking a steadying breath, he pushed the door open slowly and peered in. The room was dark, only one oil lamp lit very low on a corner table. Tom sat on the edge of the bed, hand up by his mouth, looking away from him. Wearing a long slip of a dress, all gossamer, filmy lace, it barely covered the small curves of his thin shoulders, hanging low on his chest.

Very quietly, as Chris stood there mute and staring, Tom sighed and touched carefully around one eye.

“Hello,” Chris said, locking the door and taking a step closer. But he froze when he saw Tom flinch and shift on his bottom, still refusing to meet his eyes. The light was too low, the bed was too far, and Chris wanted to drink him in entirely.

But the boy made no attempt to return his greeting, only sat frozen and pale, a wilting flower. When another tense moment passed and neither spoke again, Tom stood abruptly and turned to face the bed, dropping forward on his open palms. Legs spread, head down, it was obvious what he was offering, what he wanted over with.

“Wait,” Chris said, retreating a step. “You don’t have to do that.”

Blinking at the wall, Tom stared for a long minute before finally standing upright again and sitting back down on the edge of the mattress, back stiff as a board, eyes on the floor again. But there was a wariness about him, an anxious uncertainty about Chris’s intent, this stranger who didn’t immediately want sex. What had the boy been put through that these were his standard reactions to a customer? Walking to the oil lamp in the corner, noting how Tom turned his body to keep him in his sights, Chris adjusted the lever until the flame bounced brightly, throwing an even wash of light over the room. Coming to stand before him, Chris was careful with his movements, sensing the boy was as skittish as a rabbit.

Seeing him in this brighter light, Chris’s heart dropped. Even though the boy’s face was no longer swollen – as he imagined it probably had been before – his delicate, beautiful, elf-like features were discolored darkly with variously shaded bruises. His bottom lip was split, as was the skin by his eyebrow and left cheek, inflamed and still healing. It seemed not a spare inch of him was left untouched by marks of abuse, his wrists darkened, long lines like fingers sunk deep into the pale skin of his forearms, and his clavicles, those long delicate bones, were speckled with cruel welts. Chris almost didn’t want to see what was under the boy’s thin shift.

“I won’t touch you,” he whispered softly, wanting very much to touch him. “Not until you want.”

With that he sat down at the plush burgundy settee with gleaming dark wooden feet, and lit a cigarette. Tilting his hat back, he relaxed into the cushions, keeping his eyes somewhere by Tom’s feet, long and pale. Fine golden hairs on his toes caught the light. Blinking rapidly for a short moment, Tom was tense, looking ready to bolt out the door and away from Chris. But instead, he brought his legs up onto the bed and inched his way between the two pillows, knees drawn to his chest. At first he watched Chris, bruised eyes flicking over him as a wild animal might, but when Chris made no threatening gestures, they softened in exhaustion, lashes dipping low. Curled up into himself, gaze half-lidded, it was obvious to Chris that this was no regular prostitute. One well-versed in the ways of persuasion would have straddled Chris’s hips by now, using voice and squeeze of thigh to tilt his mood for better payment at his next visit. But the boy very clearly didn’t want anything to do with him, for the rest of the hour, or ever.

The very next day, Chris paid the Madame again and repeated his previous promise to Tom.

“I won’t touch you. Or hurt you.”

Tom, wearing the same dress of a different color, only stared at him blankly, fists curled hard into the coverlet. After making sure Chris stayed put on the settee, he resumed his position against the headboard again, but this time his eyes stayed sharp, blinking at Chris from behind the pillow he held to his chest, a flimsy guard against unwanted touch. His bruises looked worse this time, darker, but that meant they were healing. Or at least Chris hoped they were. The Madame’s filthy thugs better not still be beating the boy, he thought, lighting another cigarette. Not that Tom would confirm any of that; by the vibe of him Chris was sure Tom would rather speak to a raging buffalo than him.

“You got a name?” he asked softly, hoping to bring him out of his shell.

Giving in to some hard-engrained lesson to obey, the boy, with lips only slightly muffled by the smooth pillowcase, said, “Thomas.”

“Is that what you want me to call you?” Chris said, remembering the Madame’s remark about the girls calling him Tom.

“You can call me whatever you wish, sir.” His head ducked back down, all golden curls.

“I’ll start with your name.” Another puff of smoke up at the ceiling, a twitch at the corner of Chris’s lips, and Tom’s head ducked further, hairline red.

The third time he paid to see him, there was a visible energy buzzing around Tom when Chris walked into the room, standing quickly when he saw it was actually him and not another man.

“Why are you doing this?”

Clicking the door closed behind him, Chris halted, boot heel lifted. Eyes wide, dress sheer and lovely on his bruised body, Tom was nearly shaking as they stared at each other, skin flushing darkly at his neck.

Keeping his hands at his sides, empty, Chris said, “Doing what?”

“This,” Tom hissed, pointing at the floor. “Coming here over and over and making me go crazy with all these…these thoughts!”

“What thoughts? What are you thinking?”

“Look, I know my place, okay?” Tom said, voice deepening with sudden, brimming emotion, his pretty face collapsing in grief. “I know my place. I know my role. Alright? I’ve accepted it. I go away. I go away in here,” he said, tapping his temple with a cruel, long finger. “But then you come in here and—and.” He broke away suddenly and turned to the bed, shoulders hitching with a stilted breath. Chris let him settle first, sinking down stiffly on the edge of the mattress with a hand to his thin mouth, before finally moving. His boots made low, hollow thuds on the wooden planks, softened only when he stepped onto the intricate, foreign-looking rug. Pulling off his hat, he tucked stray strands of hair behind his ears and placed it on the table. Tom eyed it nervously, a very male artifact in this house full of women.

“Where do you go?” he tried, hoping to draw Tom into further conversation, but he was back to being silent, a ticked huff of air between his lips before casting his eyes down. Barely registering him, something crackled around Tom that Chris found almost terrifying, and heartrending. But the longer the boy sat there, naked feet and ankles across from Chris’s stained boots, the more his thumb tapped a nervous beat against his wrist, eyes darting to Chris’s face every few seconds before losing ground and retreating into himself again. He was fighting something, a voice in his head maybe. Chris could liken it to all the times he listened to a little bell in his own mind that trilled with warning that second before the hair on the back of his neck rose and he was spinning, gun already raised, cocking the hammer, finger on the trigger.

Maybe the boy was fighting an instinct to stay low and survive, or reach out and possibly suffer more. Chris was content to wait him out, whatever his choice. After a while, just as Chris was standing and reaching for his hat, Tom stirred from his hunch, blinking up at him as if from a dream. Chris wasn’t sure but he looked slightly panicked.

“Wh—Has it really been a-an hour?”

Chris put his hat on, adjusting it at the back, tucking his hair behind his ears. “They’ll come looking for me any time now. I better get going.” He started for the door but Tom’s tiny shuffle forward made him pause. The boy’s hands were clasped, worrying at the inside of his bottom lip.

“Oh,” he breathed, eyes bright with fever or tears. “Yes…alright.”

Chris smiled and took another step away, hearing the boy take an immediate step with him, as if not wanting him to leave, but hesitant to close the distance between them entirely.

Half-turned, Chris asked, “You want me to come back?”

He didn’t exactly expect an answer – admitting to something like this could be a sign of weakness in these harsher lands, especially to a stranger like Chris – but the boy’s dropped gaze, furiously shy, seemed confirmation enough. Yet, what Tom had said earlier stuck with Chris – about interrupting the escape Tom forced on himself when visited by his paying customers, Chris’s presence a tear in the tight weave he’d managed to wrap his mind in, to protect himself and his sanity – it made him wonder if he was causing Tom more harm than good. Maybe if Tom kept his head down and didn’t cause a fuss with the Madame, he would have a long life here in her service. Maybe Chris was being a sentimental wretch thinking this boy needed his help, even if looking at him now – with his soft skin, mottled from another man’s hands for some reason or other, perhaps that cut-off scream in the dark the other night – his doe eyes and their swimming tears, his pretty feet turned slightly inward so that his toes touched, a self-comforting gesture – Chris was half-ready to haul him over his shoulder and steal him away from this place and that she-devil who owned him.

Hell, he didn’t know what he wanted to do. The boy had turned his thoughts upside down, nearly forgoing caution for a spot of whimsy. Maybe this town was the wrong place for him.

“I’ll see you around, kid.”

Mouth falling open, Tom inhaled shakily as Chris pulled open the door and let himself out, standing there in his tempting dress like a pale ghost already forgotten.


	7. Hawk-Eyed Stranger and Kiss

**Tom:**

That night, Tom woke with an erection so painful he almost bit into Evangeline’s shoulder. Stifling a moan, he rose to an elbow and unwrapped himself from her, the sheets tented around his suddenly throbbing cock. He hadn’t felt this need since before traveling west, his parents’ deaths and his disgusting service to the Madame robbing him of all desire to take pleasure for himself. Roaring back with a vengeance, the force of it made him stumble to his feet and limp to the door, pausing to check that Eve was still asleep. The hallway was empty, surprising as the Madame had started keeping one of her guns at Tom and Eve’s door ever since his attempt to escape.

A hand over his crotch, he hurried to the washroom and slipped inside, splashing water on his face and using it to lubricate his hand. It was a terribly unfamiliar feeling, rubbing himself now after all his experience with men pushing themselves inside him. No strange, calloused hands trying to crush out an orgasm from him; this was his own palm, soft and warm, squeezing just so, thumb massaging the hot, slick tip. His climax was sudden and devastating, shooting out thick, copious ribbons of white, over and over, the waves of it stealing his breath, eyes rolling up inside his head. Fingers scrabbling on the wall, he fell sideways, collapsed to his knees from the force of it, balls pulsing as it finally began to wane, his sight returning to him.

Apart from one tiny whimper, he’d been silent as a mouse, teeth marks ridged deep into his already split lip, voice jammed behind his tongue. Gasping, he rose slowly, trembling terribly, and hurried to clean his mess from the floor. Just as he was about to open the door, footsteps approached on the other side and he yanked his hand back, heart jumping to his throat. The voice was immediately recognizable.

“It’s a terrible pity she’s fallen ill. One of my best girls. But that is the lot of living in this life. I can do nothing more for her.”

The sound of soft spurs meant she was probably talking to one of her hired guns. They were the only men allowed on the third floor.

“What do you want us to do?” Definitely a man.

“Get rid of her. Tonight. Before the others find out. Wouldn’t do to have them simpering over this.”

They stopped a little further down the hall, and Tom pressed his cheek to the door.

“Where is the boy?”

“Sleeping with his little girlfriend.”

The Madame scoffed. “It’s simple, friendly puppy love. It’s good to find comfort in others when one is in such a desolation. I’ll let them have that.”

“I don’t get why you don’t just work him day and night. Get the money faster.”

“Spoken by one who so obviously has never been fucked in his asshole.” There was a brief, terse silence before she continued. “Men cannot recover from sex as women can, not when used in the only hole south of their navel, so do keep your mouth shut about matters that don’t concern you and be certain that I will run my business as I see fit. Now, see to it that you bring a doctor in to examine the rest of the girls. And the boy especially. I need to make sure Beverly wasn’t the only one compromised.”

Tom gasped, remembering the girl’s wispy soft blond hair, her lips naturally red, her voice always calm and reasonable. Would she cry that night, alone, somewhere in the desert?

“Ain’t no doc gonna wanna come to a whorehouse and check on these girls. And the boy.”

“Then I trust you will use methods of persuasion that will ensure that one, in fact, does come to my whorehouse.”

They’d walked off after that and Tom waited several minutes before slinking out of the washroom, relieved to find their room still unguarded. Sliding in beside Eve, he took her limp hand and draped her arm over his waist, pushing his back into her front. He liked being held like this, liked being cocooned in something, and humming softly in his ear, she obliged him, still asleep.

Wide awake now, it was hard to deny why he’d woken so suddenly in such a state. Remnants of his dream still flickered behind his eyelids, the blue-eyed stranger the focal point. Tom still didn’t know what the man had wanted, buying him three days in a row and not laying a finger on him. It had been a kindness, surely, but an odd one at that. It made Tom more uneasy, if anything, not knowing what to anticipate from him. But he didn’t think sex was entirely out of the picture. The man had looked at him with desire, however muted and at bay, possibly even respectful. And big enough as he was, Tom was glad that it hadn’t become physical, certain that had the stranger been the mean type Tom would now lie broken and torn and irreparable.

Why the gentle prodding? Why the distance, the insistence that he wouldn’t hurt Tom, wouldn’t touch him unless Tom wanted? At this degree, at this stage in his new life with the Madame, what Tom wanted was now an entire mystery, a boggling notion. Yet this stranger curiously, randomly, offered it up to him as if Tom hadn’t just been beaten within an inch of his life for the attempt to liberate himself. He couldn’t help being suspicious of the handsome cowboy, with his tapered waist and long blond hair, eyes squinted but sharp, the brightest blue Tom had ever seen. And his hands, long-fingered and veined. Rough hands, working hands. Swallowing nervously, he realized he wanted to know what those hands would feel like on him, but gently at first, gently.

Still, the first three days had passed so quickly. Tom hadn’t realized how much he had started to look forward to the stranger walking into his assigned dark room, knowing there would be no violence, no force. But he didn’t show on the fourth day, or the fifth, and Tom began to understand that the hawk-eyed stranger might never return, that Tom’s confusion and defensive attitude might have scared him off. He might have looked at Tom and seen him for the corrupted piece of filth he was, and thought not to soil himself with him.

It didn’t stop his heart from fluttering whenever Tom was summoned to the second floor. He didn’t need Eve’s assistance anymore, but sometimes she still accompanied him. He would peer around her shoulder into the parlor below, searching, but he couldn’t spot him in the crowd of men the first few days after the stranger abandoned him, smoke hanging above their heads. Yet just as Tom was accepting that he would never see him again, that all the men who bought him would never be _him_ , he suddenly did, down at the parlor. He was impossible to miss now that he knew him, his blond hair like stalks of wheat, thick and strong, visible under his hat perched back on his head, playing cards or shooting pool, as big as a mountain compared to the others. It was that daring widow’s peak that Tom couldn’t miss if he tried, like an arrow to guide his eyes down the tanned forehead to the regal nose, and those lips so full and lovely. But if he managed to catch in time the man lifting his face to glance at him, Tom tore his eyes away, focusing on walking calmly down the hallway and out of sight.

To look at him, and be looked at by him, would be unbearable.

But it did nothing to dismiss the utter disappointment he felt whenever a customer walked in that wasn’t the blue-eyed stranger. And as Tom rocked listlessly under this or that man, eyes on the ceiling, pensive, seething, he was assuaged only somewhat by the brief fantasy he allowed himself that it wasn’t just some other desert straggler rutting into him.

That if he focused his eyes for just a single moment, he would see the soft edge of a widow’s peak, and further down, waiting lips.

**Chris:**

Hanging around the place made him itch, that tingle of anger flaring up the skin of his back so that he slammed down his cards for every win, or struck the cue stick so hard it nearly snapped. Not only did the Madame grate on him, her deep, trickling laugh following him no matter where he sat, but Tom’s frequent appearance on the second floor landing made Chris’s hand stray to the gun at his hip, eyes sharp on the men gathered in the place, wanting to shoot every last one of them for even looking at the boy. It took his all the nonchalance he could muster to keep his face blank whenever someone followed Tom up the stairs and out of sight, counting the minutes until they returned, hoping Tom was unhurt, that he wasn’t in tears.

In the end, the suspicion that he wasn’t unhurt finally got the better of him and he sought out the Madame the following week. She was at the bar speaking to a server, but dismissed him when Chris approached.

Trying to keep a low profile, fully aware of the continuous lingering looks he’d been getting of late on the streets, Chris kept his hat pulled low over his face. He didn’t want to give in to his feeling of suspicion, but he could feel something beginning to brew among the other men of the town.

“Mr. Billiards Player, however do you do?”

Chris could have sliced her throat for the stupid nicknames alone.

“I’d like to buy him for the day. And have water and food brought up to us.”

Easy mirth brightened her face, barely masking the surprise that sprung up. She chuckled. “Are you sure you have the stamina?”

Chris shrugged and gave her a wolfish grin. “Want to test me out on that?”

She very nearly stepped back, clearly uninterested. Instead she said, rather calmly, “Is he really that good?”

Chris didn’t want her to know the extent of his interest in Tom, so he said casually, “He’s alright. But I prefer taking my time before and after. And it’s not good to use a mare too often. It’ll wear her thin. Same with the boy.” He almost laughed at the flicker of thought behind her eyes, no doubt summing up the money she could make if she changed up her hours. “I can give you less money for a single hour, if you prefer that. No difference to me. He’s just another boy.”

She snapped to attention, her smile all business. “No, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A full day. With amenities.”

He was ushered into the dim hallway the very next day, the Madame there to greet him once more. She named her price and he paid her, passing her a bundle of bills. After counting it, she smiled. “Food and water will be brought up later. Three knocks.” With that she retreated into the hidden side door and was gone.

When he knocked on the lavender door he heard a very timid ‘come in’ from the inside. The boy was sitting on the edge of the bed again, the light brighter than it had been that first time Chris had bought him. The gown was different than before. Still floor-length, still transparent, it gathered in a loose weave at the waist, the sleeves coming down to each elbow, Tom’s thin chest exposed with a ruffle of lace. His back was ramrod straight, and Chris could tell it was from the tight bone-weave of a corset he spied through the gossamer material. Eyes trained on the door, there was something wide and expectant about them, and when he saw that it was Chris, they softened slightly, his relief barely contained.

Locking the door, heart thumping wildly, Chris crossed the room and dropped into a crouch in front of him. Inhaling nervously, Tom eased away an inch, still wary. Gulping silently, Chris rested both hands on Tom’s knees, chest tightening when the boy drew them together, protecting his core.

“Hey. It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”

Tom moved his eyes away, something hardening his jaw, some knowledge of the world that wouldn’t let him believe Chris. And based on how he had obviously been treated while under the Madame’s care, it was no wonder. While most of the bruises that had been so ripe the previous week were healing and fading steadily, there were new ones still, dark against the mottled green and yellow of the older signs of abuse. Around his neck and wrists, cruel hickeys sucked into his chest, his lip bitten into.

“Did one of the men do this? The men that see you?” he asked, reaching for the edge of the lace dress barely covering two small pink nipples. Pulling it low, more bruises appeared under the hem just above the stiff edge of the corset, like a canvas of plum smears.

“Don’t, sir,” Tom said, quietly urgent, closing thin fingers around Chris’s wrist and tugging. “You won’t like what you see. You can take me with the dress on, and be less repulsed.”

All rehearsed, every word. He had yet to look Chris in the eye, and it was making Chris uneasy.

“You know I won’t take you unless you want.”

Distant eyes, no connection.

“Can you look at me?”

Tom’s gaze remained low.

“Please?”

Delicate blond brows puckered, white lashes trembling as the boy finally looked directly at him.

Chris had to fight the urge to stumble back, never having seen eyes quite so terrorized, so haunted and aggrieved. The lamp did nothing to animate their dull lifelessness; two wounds that shimmered with barely suppressed tears. But he stared defiantly at Chris, giving him what he had asked for, as if daring in his own quiet way for Chris to be the one afraid.

“Who did this?” Chris asked again, voice a dangerous low rasp. Tom’s hand was still wrapped daintily around his wrist, and he was pleased that he hadn’t yet cringed from the touch.

“It’s nothing,” Tom said, voice dead. “I deserved it.”

“I really doubt that.”

Eyes back on the floor, Tom said, “What do you know about it. You’re not from around here.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because decent people stay far away from this place. Only devils and strangers come in.” Trying to process this, Chris shifted in his crouch, Tom following his movements. “Which are you, sir?”

Both, Chris thought, rising to stand. Fingers slipping off his wrist, Tom stared up at him, nervous again now that Chris so clearly towered over him.

“You…you really won’t hurt me?”

“No.”

Face crumpling in delicate confusion, he asked, “Then why are you here?”

“Because fucking and hurting aren’t always the same thing.”

Gathering his dress in a fist, Tom turned resolutely away, tears once more in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was heavy and wet. “Not always?”

Goddammit. Hands on his hips, Chris considered what to do. The boy had clearly been used over and over by the worst kind of men, apparent property of the Madame who would run him into the ground with no thought to his safety or health as long as she got her profits. The skin trade was a dirty business, but Chris had never seen or heard of a Madame being so careless with her girls, or boys, in this case. Even in some of the darker places he’d been, and he’d seen the ugly side of more than a few boomtowns. Such filth was easy to hide behind the shine of luxury, as was her obvious intent, but this boy had been handled in a way that made Chris’s blood singe.

“Why are you back?” Tom said, rubbing his brow wearily.

 _Because I can’t stand the thought of you in here with anyone else._ Instead, Chris said, “I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Would you believe me if I said I sorta have a soft spot for you?” He grinned and the corners of Tom’s lips twitched, but he only shrugged.

“How old are you, kid?”

Blinking at his question, puzzling it over, Tom asked instead. “What month is it?”

“Late July. Gonna be August soon.”

“Oh.” A short, horrified laugh. “Seems like so much longer than that. If it’s only July, then I’m still seventeen.”

Jesus Christ.

“What are we going to do then, if you won’t fuck me.”

“I never said I wouldn’t,” Chris laughed, and Tom’s face fell open in alarm. “But I won’t now. You aren’t in any kind of shape.”

The boy shrugged again. “If not you, it’ll just be someone else.”

“Well, not today they won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I bought you for the whole day.”

Tom slowly gained his feet, his dress falling in a soft wave to his ankles. “What?”

Unused to people making him feel stupid, Chris tucked his hands into his pockets. “I wanted to, well, I wanted to see you again.”

Contrasted with the savagery of his beaten body, the subtle show of innocent confusion on Tom’s face was tender and endearing, and Chris couldn’t believe anyone would ever want to hurt this boy.

“What?” he said again, meekly.

“I kept catching sight of you, after last week. Walking down the stairs with another girl. It’s the same girl each time.”

Something almost like a smile grazed Tom’s lips and he sat again on the bed, drawing his leg up more comfortably. “That’s Eve. Evangeline. She’s my only friend here.”

Taking a seat in the plush chair opposite him, Chris kept his voice low. “She’s the only one nice to you?”

“Well, no. The other girls are kind to me. Sometimes we all sleep together in bundles. But Eve and I share a room. She’s been…she’s – I’m closest with her,” he finished shyly.

It was easy to imagine the girls gathered to sleep together, pastel doves in the dark. “And the boss lady?”

Something shuttered over Tom’s face, and Chris hurried to say, “Seems like a right bitch. Frosty with greed. She the one that had you beat last time?”

Tom nodded.

“Why?”

Voice a rasp, cheeks flushing under the bruises, Tom said, “Because I tried to run away.”

Something cold tangled in Chris’s gut, and he leaned forward. “When?”

A deep sigh, eyes flicking around the ceiling. “I don’t know. Time passes strangely for me here. But before you.”

Chris remembered the cut-off scream in the dark, the flailing arm snatched out of sight, the pillowcase bundled with food left strewn, abandoned in the dirt.

_Adelaide._

And just before Chris had bought Tom the first time, just before being told that Tom was ‘indisposed’, the man sent to retrieve the Madame had knuckles busted and bruised. All from beating the shit out of the slim, bird-boned boy in front of him. Fucking cowards.

“It was you,” he heard himself say, and Tom’s eyes snapped to his. “Out on the street that night.”

Another frown. “Me?”

“Yeah. You.” Reaching into his back pocket, Chris brought out the carefully folded pillowcase he’d been carrying with him and handed it to Tom, who took it in his thin, trembling fingers, mouth falling open as he recognized the creamy material.

“Oh,” he breathed, two fat tears splashing down his cheeks. His gaze on Chris was watery and devastated. “Oh, my god, no.” He gave one deep cry and then buried his face in both hands, the pillowcase crumpled in between. Shoulders shaking, his weeping muffled, Tom rocked slowly forward and back, all devastated moans. Cursing quietly, Chris rose to his feet and went to the boy, sitting down beside him and closing his arms around his slender, shaking form. Tom stiffened at first, trying to draw away but Chris had only to give him a gentle squeeze before the boy relented and was sagging against him as much as his corset would allow, great big sobs wracking his body. But they were shallow and quick, lungs constricted. Arms around his waist, face tucked into his neck like a child, Tom clung to him as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did. Maybe he hadn’t felt a gentle touch from a man in a long time, his first instinct to cower in fear, expectant of pain and cruelty at the whims of another person’s pleasure. But that sweet yearning for acceptance was evident in how quickly he had collapsed into Chris’s arms, and Chris made a dangerous, stupid vow to himself that he would save this boy, somehow.

“They’ll kill me,” Tom cried, panting. “She will. Or her men. Or the customers. But they’ll kill me.” Broken little hiccups, gasps that trembled through him, face shining and wet, Chris held him all the harder for it, like embracing a tender little sapling from the European trees that grew in twisted grace back east.

“Alright, it’s alright,” he whispered, rubbing the boy’s back, the hard ridges of whalebone bumping under his fingers. Heat flooded his neck, unaccustomed to the burgeoning feelings erupting all over his insides, caring for the boy as unexpected and lovely as spring rains. “You’ve got to breathe now, or you’ll faint. Deep steady breaths.”

Tom whimpered and shifted under his touch, a pained grimace on his face. Hooking a hand around his waist, Chris kept him close, loathe to lose contact. “What did they do to you?”

Sniffling, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, Tom blinked down at his lap, lashes dripping. It seemed he couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t inhale very deeply. But he managed the air it took to say, “Do you want to see?”

No, he thought, but nodded yes.

Pushing to his feet, Tom stood motionless before Chris for a moment, the light throwing half of his face in shadow. But then he gathered the hanging lace of his dress and started to lift it by slow inches. Revealed to Chris were long, pale feet and thin, bony ankles. Higher still, the nervous flex of slim calf muscles and knobby knees. Light brown hairs reflected off lean thighs marked at random with fading bruises of various sizes, up, up to the darker gathering of curls around a limp cock and tight sac, impressive for the boy’s smaller stature. Keeping his eyes on Chris, Tom dragged his dress up to his shoulders – the corset cinched tightly over his slim and tiny waist, the dark green of verdant forests.

Chris swallowed, hand already rising. “Can I—?”

Tom said nothing, only watched him with those eyes devastated with tears. Moving slowly, eyes trained on the boy’s, Chris reached around the back of him and tugged the first string free. One by one the loops loosened as he worked them up and out, Tom’s body rocking slightly. Chris remained seated, knowing that to stand would spike Tom’s nervousness, and when the corset finally fell loose he was gifted with an up close view of what the garment had been hiding. Soft skin indented from unforgiving whalebone, a small navel, and black ribs expanding in Tom’s first real deep breath. He was very quiet, tiny gasps falling from his lips, and then he slowly turned, revealing the dark splotches on his belly and chest, his entire back one giant bruise. The long line of his spine, each tender little nub of bone, the long young-boy muscles, even his buttocks were bruised, two ugly contusions with deep centers almost black, like from the tip of a boot kick.

“They are fading, but…it’s hideous, isn’t it?” Tom said quietly.

Chris had to grit down on his back teeth to prevent his anger from swelling. “But you aren’t,” he eventually said, and Tom shot a look at him over his shoulder. He let his dress fall and was once more hidden from view. When he lifted a hand slowly, Chris held himself still, watching Tom’s fingers uncurl from his fist, the tips just barely grazing the prickly stubble on his jaw.

“You,” he whispered, lips trembling. “You are not like them. Why are you being so kind?”

Blinking, Chris shook his head. “I won’t hurt you. Like I said, I wanted to get to know you.”

Exhaling shakily, another tear spilled. “I am so weary,” he moaned, standing above him, an angel of sorrow. “So tired. I can’t begin to explain.”

 _Fuck the Madame._ “Come here,” Chris said, reaching to wrap both hands around Tom’s small waist, but Tom went willingly, buckling into his lap, drawing his legs up with the lace draped loosely over his soft bare feet. He was softer and more pliant without the corset on, even more fragile. Both arms went around Chris’s back, his head once more tucked against his neck, and he gave a tremulous sigh.

“I’ve not been held like this. My heart is beating so fast.”

Indeed, Chris could feel the knock of it against his chest, could imagine being able to see the pulse flutter sweetly at his throat under his pale skin. He was so thin, underfed, it would be so easy to break him. In the warm light of that small, impersonal room, Chris rocked the boy, a slow sway, inhaling his scent of apples and milk, and something feminine, like perfume.

“Your customers hurt you badly?” Surely not all of them, Chris thought, surely not all the men who’ve touched him did so with the intention to cause him pain? _Are we that bad?_

Tom shrugged, a warm, moist weight in his arms. With his cheek pressed to Chris’s shoulder, his head started to lag back, drowsiness funneling into his blue eyes. “I’m surprised I still have all my teeth,” he said darkly, his words carving a hole right through the center of Chris.

“Are you hungry? Someone will bring us food in a little bit,” he said, hoping to quell the fury bubbling up in him.

In his quietest voice, eyes blinking slowly, the boy said, “Yes. Always.”

Heart moved, Chris cupped a hand on Tom’s head, sliding a thumb over the bruised skin of his cheek. Two apples and a fucking loaf of bread. The boy would never have survived. “Little bird,” he said, and Tom’s eyes fluttered open.

“What’s your name?”

Chris grinned, and Tom’s lips echoed it, a reflex happiness. “You wanna know my name?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Chris.”

“Chris,” Tom repeated, his fingers knotting into the back of Chris’s shirt, a surprisingly possessive gesture. His head dipped back and he gasped in alarm, eyes flashing open, sagging closed again. “I’m sorry, I’m…I’m not sleeping well.”

“You can sleep now. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Staring at him through trembling lashes, Tom hesitated a moment before snuggling more evenly on Chris, head tucked against his shoulder. Content to sit there cradling him, Chris kept his eyes on the door and on Tom, flicking between the two. Occasional voices from the hall made him stiffen, squeezing Tom’s warm body in his arms, but they moved along quickly, nobody lingering at doorways to listen at the lewd noises they themselves had just finished making. Hardly jostling the boy, Chris rose to his feet smoothly and walked around to the other side. Leaning low to place him on the sagging mattress, he hushed Tom gently when he startled and whined, clasping at his biceps.

“It’s okay. It’s Chris. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

“I’m not,” Tom said, face crumpling, refusing to let him go. That hazy, half-sleep look was heavy on his soft face. “I’ll never be safe. She has my life in her claws.” The fear that he had managed to keep under some semblance of control beforehand exposed itself in a terrifying wave, his paranoia and anxiety about the likely chance of his death at the hands of the Madame or her men seemed like a black cloth unfurling over his heart, face broken open in raw emotion.

“I’ll keep running,” the boy vowed, a vicious snarl twisting his lovely lips, fatigue making clear his devastation. “She can’t keep me. I’m not hers. I’m not!”

“Easy now. Shh.”

Kicking off his boots and unbuckling his gun belt – noting Tom’s unease around it – Chris climbed in beside the boy’s slight form, his legs stretching out farther than his lace-clad ones.

“There. Come here.” He thought Tom would refuse, but he wrapped himself around Chris with no hesitation, shoving his feet between Chris’s ankles, short puffs of breath at the hollow of his throat.

“Are you real? Am I dreaming? Have they killed me and I’m a ghost stuck in my own torment?”

“I’m real, little bird,” Chris said, cupping his head, frail, so slight, the whole of him. “You’re not hers, you hear? You’re not anybody’s but your own. No one will kill you.” _Not now that I know you, and want you safe and unharmed._

“This is nice, you might be nice, but it’s only one day, Chris. There are always more men. More and more.” He sighed. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m trapped.”

“How did you find yourself stuck here?”

In whispers, fingers twisted in his shirt again, Tom explained about his parents’ death, struggling through the desert, collapsing on the street, the Madame finding him and putting him to work.

“The first man was terrible, and then after, well. They’re all one big blur.”

“What does your friend say?”

“She’s angry at the Madame. She hates that I, that all of us, are forced to do this to uphold some kind of debt we owe her.”

“Hardly seems fair that she gets to say when the debt is paid.”

Tom huffed, wet eyelashes brushing Chris’s throat. “She’s a snake.”

But then he stiffened in Chris’s arms and slowly started backing away, new terror dawning in his eyes. “You’re…you’re not one of hers, are you? Y-you’re not here, pretending to be nice, just—just to catch me talking badly about her? So that she will beat me again? Sweet god, why didn’t I think of it before—.” Panic widened mouth, distressed.

“No,” Chris said, lowering his voice, locking his hands around Tom’s biceps, but the boy began to struggle. “No. Take it easy. I’m not here to bust you.”

“No! Oh, god. No! You can’t—please!”

Chris tugged Tom forward, rising to crouch over him, a hand over his mouth. With a muted squeal, Tom kicked his legs, lace flying everywhere, hitching up to bundle at his tender waist.

“I’m not, Tom. Okay? I’m not one of hers. I heard them take you that night. I found your pillowcase. I’d seen you on the balcony and wanted you so badly. I want you still. But I didn’t know how deep this pain went, how much she’s hurt you.” Breathing heavily through his nose, Tom stared up at him, pressed flat to the bed, but he was listening. “I had this gnawing suspicion about her. And seeing you now, beat to shit, your voice heavy with how much you’re frightened, I can’t ignore that. I can’t ignore you. So you got me now. I’m in it. Do you understand?”

Eyes glistening, Tom squeezed them shut, tears leaking down his temples and into his hair. The kid’s emotions were all over the place, understandable given what he’d experienced, and Chris couldn’t imagine how exhausting that was, how draining on his spirit. Letting his weight ease more comfortably on Tom, Chris could feel the soft trembling in his legs, slim like a girl’s against his rugged trousers. He removed his hand from Tom’s mouth, the imprint of it white for a moment before the purple of his bruises rushed back to the surface. Cupping his head, smoothing back his curls, Chris held his gaze, wanting him to see the truth.

“Okay? I’m not going to hurt you. Do you believe me, little bird? Hmm?”

Noses an inch apart, soft golden curls under the width of his palms, Chris could smell his sweet breath, crushed berries and something contrived, like bitten herb.

“Do you?” He couldn’t bear Tom’s silence, the conflict behind the shade of his eyes, battling what he knew of the world versus what Chris might possibly be able to offer him. And then his long throat bobbed as he swallowed, hands back in the folds of Chris’s shirt, spread wide over the side of his waist, like a lover might.

“Yes,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Yes, I believe you.”

Chris smiled, letting the tips of their noses brush. “Good boy.”

Shaking his head, convincing himself, nearly cross-eyed, Tom said, “You won’t hurt me? You won’t?”

“No. I won’t. God, I won’t. I couldn’t. Not you.”

“Okay,” Tom said, nodding quickly. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Sweet bird,” Chris whispered, and then he ducked his head low and planted a quick peck to Tom’s mouth. Tom gasped in surprise and went still, lips in a curious ‘o’.

“What?” Chris said, smiling slowly. “No one’s kissed you before?”

Tom shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving his, and in that moment Chris realized his mistake about the extent of Tom’s experience with men, with people. It was telling, because how could there have been room for gentleness in his life here, used only the pleasure of others? His wants and desires sacrificed for the Madame’s selfish gain, and the customers’ regrettable satisfaction? But seeing him now, the round, tear-rimmed eyes staring up at him drove home the point more than the bruises and cold willingness to submit. Tom’s entire notion of sex was skewed and inaccurate, and it had made him afraid to live.

“This isn’t a place for kissing,” Tom eventually said softly, eyes downcast.

“Shit,” Chris whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Tom looked ready to say something when there were three succinct knocks on the door. They spun their heads around, Tom creeping further under him.

“It’s okay. It’s just some food and water. But we gotta make it seem like we’ve been fucking, okay?”

“Uh-huh,” Tom said, nodding. They scrambled up, Chris loosening his trousers and unbuttoning his shirt, Tom pulling up his dress and shimmying out of each sleeve, letting the material gather over his belly, lewd and ravaged.

“Good,” Chris said, voice hoarse. “Good. You look good.”

Tom smiled with a shaky breath, prettily. His eyes strayed down to the parting in Chris’s trousers, the edge of his balls just peeking out under the hem of his shirt. Curiosity in his open gaze, careful interest.

Shuffling across the room, Chris threw open the door. “Yeah?”

The servant peered in over his shoulder, and Chris followed his gaze to Tom on the bed, who was now lying on his side facing away. The round curve of his bottom was only barely covered by his dress, but the bruises on his back were clearly visible. The corset lay crumpled on the floor, as good a place for it as any. Chris put on a disinterested face and turned back to the servant.

“You got my food?”

“Yes,” the man said quickly, indicating a tray in his hands. There was a plate of meat and breads, with fruit and a type of pink cream Chris had no idea how to identify. There was also a jug of cold water.

“Go on and set it on the table.” He stepped aside so the man could walk in, catching how he kept glancing at Tom on the bed, who slowly rose to an elbow, appearing sluggish and worn out.

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, taking the tip Chris handed him. Chris closed the door and locked it, turning back to Tom already crawling over the bed to where the food sat.

“Have it all,” Chris said, smiling, reaching into his back pocket for a spare cigarette. He lit the tip and inhaled, blowing the excess smoke out of his nose. Tom brought the tray to the bed and curled his legs under him, taking a piece of meat and gnawing on it neatly.

“You won’t eat?”

“No. The place I’m bunking, the woman who runs it, her name’s Belen. She feeds me every time she sees me.”

“She sounds delightful,” Tom said with a full mouth, biting into more meat.

Chris sniffed out a quick laugh. “She is. She puts on a tough exterior, won’t smile unless she really wants to. But I’m sweet on her, and she’s very nice.”

Smiling, Tom blinked down at his knees. If it weren’t for all those damn bruises, Chris might have been able to believe that Tom was his sweet little wife resting in their bedroom after a nice, slow fuck, and not working as a prostitute for an iron-fisted, she-devil pimp.

“You’ll be able to sleep unbothered tonight?”

Chewing, drinking some water, Tom said, “Yes. I don’t work nights. The girls cover that shift on their own. Most of the men that want me only come during the day.” He shrugged and took another bite from the bread. “Must have wives or something.”

An astute observation, most likely true.

“And you’d never, you know…,” Chris said, taking another drag. “Before?”

Another hot flush of color on his cheeks. “No. Never.”

That bitch, Chris thought, blowing the smoke up at the ceiling. Throwing a virgin into a den of lions. The boy couldn’t have known what he was in for, what the men would expect of him, how terribly he would be treated.

“Well, I already figured. You’re nothing like a real prostitute.”

Tom’s eyes flickered low. “That’s all I am now.”

“No, little bird,” Chris insisted, inhaling an acrid burn. “You’re definitely not.”

Now that he knew he was in no immediate harm, that no one would be forcing their body parts into him, Tom was quietly radiant. His smiles, while small and shy, came easily to him. Given more time, more trust, Chris imagined he might be as playful as a kitten, and it was truly a delight imagining him in a life after this one, far away from this place.

After Tom finished eating and Chris’s cigarette was crushed in the pearl ashtray, they lay back down on the bed, a careful foot of distance between them. And as if a flood of words had been dammed up inside his throat, Tom started talking, steadily and without hurry, about his life on the east coast, his duty to inherit his father’s company, attending university.

“Everything was sorted for me, all I had to do was be present, participate, excel. Every day planned, my lessons, my duties. Now nothing is certain. I never know if I’ll make it to tomorrow.”

Chris grazed a thumb over Tom’s thin wrist, felt the pulse jump there. “Probably would have gotten married too.”

Tom rolled to his side, facing him. Arms tucked under his head, he peered curiously at Chris. “I don’t know. It would have happened eventually, but to a woman probably. I hadn’t really…” He trailed off, brow bunched in thought. “Any other choice would have been impossible.”

Chris rolled to the side, mirroring his posture. “You never thought about men before?”

“Well, I—I certainly noticed them.”

“What did you notice?” It was truly a pleasure watching him blush, watch him fret, such innocence.

Tender little fidgets as the boy thought. “Their hands? Their laughter. I like the soft hairs at the napes of their necks.” He unconsciously reached behind his head. “I wish I could see their legs.”

“Don’t your customers take their clothes off?”

“Not really, no. Even when…some of them go for a long time, it’s just unbuttoned trousers. And I never look at them anyway.”

“Why don’t you think of the things you like about men with the ones who come see you here? Just to make it a little easier?”

“I can’t. That would make it too personal. I don’t want to think on any of this with any kind of affection. I’m here against my will. To me, they are all monsters.”

Touching his arm gently, Chris gave it a soft squeeze. “It’s good that you’re angry. You’ll survive this yet.”

Tom glanced at him, doubt written on his face. “I don’t know that I will. I feel myself falling deeper and deeper into the place I go to hide. I’m sleeping a lot, but feel so tired. Like my mind doesn’t rest. All these bruises, the fucking, that beating her men gave me.” He sighed. “I can’t catch up.”

“And she doesn’t feed you.”

“She does. But very little. And I’ve been passing on eating lately because my jaw hurts. And my tailbone feels funny…after.” He squished his face under an arm, voice muffled. “I’m sorry. That was too much information.”

Chris took his wrist and tugged his arm away from his pink face. He smiled. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be ashamed of anything.”

“But Chris, I can’t help it. I feel so ashamed, so pitiful. What would my parents think?”

“There ain’t no point wondering about that now. You’re living, and they’re not. You’re surviving when they couldn’t. And it isn’t no fault of yours, them taken from you. Sometimes these things happen and we are spared, or we aren’t.”

“And you?” Tom said, taking Chris’s hand and touching their fingertips together, the lightest skim. “What is your story?”

“I don’t have one.”

“You have to.”

“No.”

“You won’t tell me?” That ink of hurt was rising in his eyes, and Chris fumbled for words to comfort him.

“I’m just a rogue cowboy. Nothing special to me.”

“There has to be something. I told you mine.”

He palmed the side of Tom’s head, noting with cold fury the closed-eyed flinch the boy gave, expecting a blow.

“Easy,” he whispered, and Tom’s eyes sprang open. “Not from me…remember?”

Licking his lips, Tom blinked quickly. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Chris eyed the long, lean line of Tom’s body, top knee angled toward him, giving him that curvy-hipped look of most women, and the sudden ache in his bones was too much. “Can I hold you?”

Not half-asleep anymore, Tom wasn’t all original sweet instinct, cuddling in his lap, mind frayed. Relaxed enough, belly full, he was wide awake and mindful of Chris next to him, eyes darting from one part of him to another, clavicle, abdomen, legs, feet, crotch (furious red face), hands, lingering on hands. Chris knew he had big hands, knew the kind of damage he could cause with them, and perhaps it’s what Tom was contemplating too, no matter his attraction to them. He’d had more than enough negative experience with men and their hands to fully trust another pair on his body.

Tom inhaled through his mouth, blew it out slowly through his nose, eyes closed, whispering almost to himself, “Won’t hurt me.”

Chris stayed quiet, waiting, and then after another tremulous breath, Tom inched over until their bellies and thighs were flush, squeezing one arm under Chris’s armpit and the other over the top of his waist, hugging him close. Folding him against his chest, Chris grazed both hands up and down the smooth, bare skin of Tom’s back, the sleek muscles, the butterfly-winged bones of his shoulder blades, the dip in his waist. His hand spanned the entire width of it, he was so slight.

“That feels nice,” Tom murmured. “But…I know you aren’t real. I’m sure of it. I’m asleep upstairs, and it’s probably early morning, and I’ll wake and you’ll be gone.” Letting him ramble, Chris pressed his lips to Tom’s temple, breathing in the scent of his hair, cupping a hand over his shoulder, hoping it made him feel bundled and safe. “But the memory of you will sustain me, if only for a little while. I might tell Eve about this dream. I think she’ll like it…” He hummed, breathing softly, deep tufts of air, and fell asleep again, fingers curled in his shirt once more. It was a calm quiet, no intrusive sounds from other rooms, just Tom breathing and Chris’s heartbeat knocking, knocking on his ribs. And it was the easiest thing to just drift a bit with him, like white clouds in the sky, aimless.

Knock, knock, knock.

The hard raps on the door startled them both awake, Tom sitting up fast, eyes wide, chest jumping.

Shit. How long had they been asleep? Keeping a hand on him, Chris whispered that it was okay, getting to his feet and inching the door open. A girl stood there, a little older than Tom, with a tray in her hands. Their lunch with more water.

“Thank you,” Chris said, about to take it from her and close the door. But she jerked it just out of reach, smiling quickly.

“My apologies, sir, but I’ll just set it on the table for you.” She tried flicking her eyes over his shoulder, but he was too tall for her to see anything. There was a different kind of energy about her than there was with the previous servant, who just seemed nosey. This girl appeared concerned.

He stepped aside. “Come in.”

Hurrying on small feet, she walked inside, gaze lighting on Tom immediately.

“Eve?” Tom said, rising to his knees on the bed.

“Tom,” she said, smiling wide. Placing the tray on the table, she ran to him and hugged him carefully, mindful of his injuries. Their embrace was several seconds long, Chris standing off to the side, waiting. The girl pulled back, grasping his head, her whispers low. “I’m sorry, Tom. I brought the tray up from the kitchen because I had to check on you. When I heard that you’d been bought for the entire day by one customer, I didn’t know what to think, what he might be making you do.” She glanced at Chris, unsure, before turning back to Tom. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, Eve!” Tom said, grinning. “I’m fine, I promise.” She stared at him, as if awed, and they shared a meaningful look, something spoken between them.

“Thank goodness,” she gasped, hugging him again. “I’ve interrupted. I’m so sorry. Sir, please I’ll leave now.”

“You don’t have to,” Chris said, standing at the table and lifting the plate of more meat and bread. “Are you hungry?”

Eve looked to Tom, who smiled and nodded. Curious, she kept close to him, slipping her hand into his as Chris brought the tray to the bed, their behavior and Tom’s general happy manner confusing her. But Chris kept a respectful distance from them, enjoying the clear affection between the two. They touched a lot, Eve’s hand in the crook of Tom’s elbow, Tom’s fingers curling in the skirt over her thigh. The food was split three-ways, the tray perched in the middle of their crooked triangle, the water jug passed from one to the other.

“I’m really so sorry to have interrupted,” Evangeline said again.

Leaning back against the headboard, Chris shook his head once. “You were worried about your friend.”

Evangeline lifted a shoulder delicately. “A constant pastime in this occupation.”

Tom sniffed thinly through his nose, nodding seriously.

“What’s this pink stuff?” Chris asked.

She dipped her finger into the slop of it on the tray. “Custard. A customer visiting from California brought it for the Madame as a gift. It was packaged in ice. Very expensive.”

Incredible, Chris thought, hating the woman even more. “Very cosmopolitan,” he said vaguely.

“I really should go,” Evangeline said after a moment. “I’ll be missed.” The tray was empty save for crumbs and strips of fat from the meat, and she gathered everything up to remove it from the room. She leaned her head toward Tom and he planted a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll see you tonight, darling.” With a decidedly more careful smile at Chris, she left.

“So that’s your friend,” Chris said as Tom stared after her, love so plain on his face.

“Isn’t she lovely?”

Chris agreed quietly, his eyes on Tom’s profile. “You’re sad again.”

Blinking, Tom sighed and shuffled up the bed to sit by Chris against the headboard. Curling his legs against his chest, his lace dress tucked around his ankles, he said, “Seeing her reminds me of how different she and I might be, happier, if we were rid of her.”

There was no question about who he was talking about. “The Madame.”

Tom nodded, head leaning against the bars of brass, eyes soft on Chris. His chest jumped in a little sob, jaw clenched. He touched Chris’s wrist, held it fast. “I’m so sorry, I’m not usually this weepy.”

“Sweetheart,” Chris whispered, and reached for him. Tom rushed toward him, arms wrapping around Chris’s neck as Chris gathered him close and let them fall to the mattress. Embracing him was a tender and precious thing, this wisp of a boy lending him his affection even at the risk of his better judgement. But it wasn’t only for Chris, this gift, Tom needing a gentle touch like one starved. Cheek to cheek, his long hands spread tightly over Chris’s back, he was generous in what he allowed Chris to feel, frigid in what he denied others, no matter their payment and force.

It couldn’t have been brighter than the sun, for Chris.

“What will I do?” Tom gasped, sliding long fingers into Chris’s hair a little roughly, his blunt nails dragging through his scalp. Chris caught his groan, chills erupting on his skin as his groin tightened with interest. “What will I do when I’m called down here again and it’s not you who walks in? It’s some other disgusting, dirty, hideous man. Always leering at me, like they know something I don’t. Like in their head they’re already inside me, hurting me, holding me down. Chris—.” A sharp, distraught gasp.

“I’m here, babe. I’m here.” He ducked his head and kissed the fat drops of tears that leaked from the corners of Tom’s eyes, carefully peppering the rest of his face as Tom panted and whispered, blushing wildly. Already, a kind of panic was darkening his eyes, hazing them over, closing Chris off.

“What will I do?” he said again, over and over, and Chris took his head in both hands.

“Hey. C’mon now. Listen to me.” But Tom was fading into his own mind, lips moving soundlessly, eyes squeezed shut at whatever horrors he was seeing there. Without another thought, Chris leaned down and pressed his lips to Tom’s, mouth closed. Jolting underneath him, Tom inhaled sharply through his nose, a tiny noise vibrating in his throat. If his eyes were open, in shock or fear, Chris didn’t know, he just held their kiss for a moment longer and then broke off, peering down at the boy.

Stunned, mouth parted, Tom blinked owlishly at him, a tear sliding down his temple and disappearing into his hair. Very slowly, shifting his hands up Chris’s neck, he cupped them on each cheek and pulled him down. They both moaned at the contact this time, Tom’s leg bumping his hip, a slim foot nudging the back of his thigh. Heart racing now, body thrumming with new need, Chris very gently widened his mouth, prompting Tom’s lips to open. They did, shyly, and when Chris slipped in his tongue Tom’s eyes flew wide. A soft caress of wet muscle and he all but melted, sagging with a shudder as he twisted fingers into Chris’s hair, all ragged, vibrating moan. Chris felt the timid stir between Tom’s legs and eased his hips a little lower, to feel it, to encourage.

Tom broke away, flushed chest and neck, lips red as he whispered Chris’s name once more.

“You okay? Is this okay?” Chris nudged his pelvis down again and Tom’s eyes flicked to where their hips were pressed snugly, eyebrows rising in bewilderment as his erection slowly filled.

“Tom?”

Gold-flecked blue eyes zipped up to his, and Tom swallowed nervously, pupils as wide as saucers.

His silence was shaken, but curious, and Chris took that as a positive. “Alright now, this is good. You like this, and that’s good. Want a little more?”

Tom’s hands were shaking, one twisted in his shirt, the other flopped back on the sheets, soft fingertips pointed up at the ceiling. Dipping his head, Chris nuzzled a soft cheek, trailing his lips to the sharp line of his jaw, and then a little lower, kissing Tom’s neck, burrowing past his ear, mouthing, mouthing, hot breath and suck. Spine arching, legs falling open, Tom’s moan was cracked. He rolled his hips and grabbed at Chris with two long hands, tugging at the material of his shirt until he could slip them in under the hem and finally touch the wide expanse of Chris’s back.

“Yes,” he squeaked, lashes fluttering at Chris’s heavy weight. “Yes, this.”

Smooth and warm, he explored and squeezed, rosy mouth parted, pearl of teeth flashing, pink tongue and sweet breath.

“Babe,” Chris groaned, strands of hair falling in his face. Looking down at the boy, a rush of pleasure and pride surged in his chest. Lace shift bundled up at his waist, Tom’s thighs were pale and long, muscles thin from point of knee down to the split of his pale bottom – all endearing peach fuzz cleft – and straining against Chris’s belt his lovely erection, the appearance of which flushed the boy’s cheeks prettily and dewed his enormous eyes.

“I need the oil,” Chris whispered, beginning to move away, but at the frightened alarm on Tom’s face, he crowded back over him, palming his head. “No, sweetheart. Not for that. You’re not ready for that. I won’t do that to you. Not yet. Okay?”

At Tom’s quick nod, Chris retrieved the ceramic bowl from the table and lifted its bone-shell lid. The oil swam thickly, gleaming in the lamplight, and when he brought it over to the bed again Tom sat up on his elbows, peering into the bowl.

“None of them ever use this on you?”

“No. Some slick themselves with it, but not all. We take care to prepare ourselves before. Me and the girls.”

“So, you’ve…touched yourself with this before? To stretch yourself?” If the boy had been allowed to do at least that, then Chris hoped that not all of his experiences here had been so frighteningly painful.

Lying back again, Tom trailed fingers up and down Chris’s spine, a nervous gesture, maybe. But at his nod Chris felt a flood of relief, even if the knowledge of preparedness had not saved the boy from repeated violations by men he wanted nothing to do with. Swallowing, Chris put the bowl on the mattress beside them and lay back down at Tom’s side, holding his weight on an elbow as he leaned over him. “I’m sorry,” he said, trailing his gaze over every angle and curve of Tom’s beautiful face, so little and fragile and pale next to his outstretched arm, tanned brown from the sun, golden hairs thick at his wrist.

“Kiss me?” Tom said, chin jutting upward a small fraction. It was that tiny inflection, like he wasn’t sure Chris would again, that drove a shot of desire straight through Chris’s groin and he bent to kiss that sweet mouth again, Tom arching into him, Chris flattening himself, a tug of war between navels and sighing ribcages. Pecking his cheeks again, flushed with blood, Chris lifted the hem of Tom’s dress and draped it higher on his hips, exposing his rigid cock rooted in a soft bundle of dark blond curls. Reaching for the oil, he scooped some into his hand and leaned his forehead to the boy’s temple, both watching as he rubbed his fingers on the inside of his palm, smearing the glistening oil.

“What are you—?” Tom started, but hissed when Chris wrapped slicked fingers around his erection and squeezed. Dropping his head back, he sighed and gave a short tremble, muscles turning loose under Chris’s attention. Tightening one arm behind Chris’s back and wrapping the other around his neck, Tom clung to him sweetly, moaning in his ear, so wanton and willing it made Chris’s head spin. Moving his fist down to the base, Chris stretched his fingers to his sac and flexed, massaging gently through the bundle of hair.

“Ooh,” Tom sighed, hand clenching reflexively on Chris’s skull. “That’s…that’s so….” But his words were lodged in the hard bob of his throat, casting despairing eyes at Chris, who closed his fist again and moved it from tip to base, again and again, rubbing his thumb at the slit, that gleam of dew that bubbled stickily with every swipe. Nipples peaked, thighs shaking, feet restless against Chris’s legs, Tom was falling deeper into that coiled void Chris knew fondly. _Kiss, kiss_ , he heard, hot puff of air in his ear, and he happily granted Tom’s wish, bending to press their lips together, so eager for hot tongue and blunt nails scratching.

With a shy and tentative touch, Tom crept a hand down Chris’s arm to his hip, lower still to the hardened bulge behind the buttons of trousers. Eyes hooded and hazed, he broke from their kiss to stare at where he cupped Chris, tightening his thin fingers in curious, determined grips. Gritting his jaw, trying not to blow too fast, Chris let him explore, adoring the sweet pucker of the boy’s pale brow, pleasure and interest warring over his features, eyes flicking shyly up at Chris to gauge his reaction, falling closed as Chris continued pumping his hand steadily.

Tom whispered his name with just the slightest lisp.

“Yeah, babe,” he groaned, nudging Tom’s cheek with his nose, which made the boy giggle. Hand moving, heat rising, Tom’s little whimpers grew louder, faster, causing Chris’s own breath to hitch. Staring wide-eyed down at him, twisting his wrist and stroking from tip to base, he coaxed and coaxed until Tom finally crested that precipice and came with a strangled cry. Throbbing under Chris’s hand, balls drawing up and dropping in rhythmic pulses, Tom gushed a thick stream that flowed from the tip of his cock over Chris’s fingers to puddle on his quivering abdomen.

Nails dug deep into his back and Chris arched, jaw clenched. The soft, hot, moist body of the boy squirmed beneath him, helpless as he fought to regain his senses through the waves of pleasure crashing over him. And Chris held him, whispering at his temple, squeezing out those last few drops before Tom gave another sharp yelp and he released him. Flopping to rest between his clenched legs, Tom’s cock was dripping and spent, exhausted like him.

“Okay, little bird, you’re okay,” Chris soothed, pressing his forehead to Tom’s and clasping the top of his head with his dry hand. But giving small little shakes and whispering nonsense, Tom was anything but fine, eyes nearly crossed from the strength of his orgasm. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. Come here, baby bird.” Wiping his hand on the sheet, Chris gathered Tom to him and wrapped him completely in his arms, smothering him with warmth and kisses, ecstatic when Tom began responding, clutching back at him with every limb, breathy sobs at his throat.

“Chris. Oh, my darling. Chris. Chris, please, closer.”

Bound in each other, insistent with hurried, pecked kisses, very quietly they laughed and sighed, happy and flushed, adoring. That small, deep voice of his, with his tender little affections and ragged breaths, cut through the core of Chris and carved itself into the very meat of him, nestled like a coil of copper, shining and strong, ready to spring up into his heart and squeeze. “You,” the boy whispered, hand sliding back down Chris’s hip. “Now you.”

“You don’t have to, babe. I’m more than content to hold you here and do nothing.”

“I have never in my life wanted someone to climax as much as I want you to.” Big blue blinks, fan of blond lashes, and Chris was gutted.

“Okay,” he rasped, and angled his hips back to let Tom unbutton his trousers, reach under the edge and take him in hand. He exhaled quickly, abdomen jumping. “Your hands are really…fucking soft,” he said, curling his fist into the sheets, Tom’s palms like satin on his cock. Tom smiled, and it transformed his entire face from tragic beauty to exultant angel. Chris wanted him burned into his memory, every freckle, every angle and dimple, the perfect curve of his ears. His fist started pumping on Chris’s length, fingertips only barely grazing around the width of him. Leaning his chin upward, Tom planted wet smacks on the underside of Chris’s jaw, tracing his nose through the stubble there, so enraptured with the fun beginnings of sex he couldn’t have known how dizzy it was making Chris, that flash of desire at his core like a lightning strike, the desperation, the _instinct_ to bury himself deep. It had been a while since he’d come, so in quick, determined jerks he brought his pants down mid-thigh to best avoid the mess he knew he would make.

Tom’s eyes widened at the sight of him, lingering at his heavy, full balls. His own leg widened, almost on instinct, and he turned a deep shade of scarlet, hiding his face against Chris’s shoulder, hand working determinedly at his erection.

Chris chuckled, and coddled him close. “Sweetheart. I’ll be buried in you yet. I promise.”

“Yes,” Tom breathed, eyes nearly black. “Yes, okay.”

When Chris came, it was over the sharp point of Tom’s hipbone, spilling thick and copiously, long spurting ribbons of it, a groan caught behind his teeth. Inhaling the sweet perfume of Tom’s hair, he fell forward with a shudder, his hips giving small thrusts against the boy. Pressed flat beneath him, Tom held him with one arm, mimicking Chris’s gesture and rubbing at his cock until the very last of it nearly killed him.

“Fuck. Okay. Okay, okay. I give.”

And Tom, supremely delighted, he let him go and threw his arms around his neck, bumping noses and laughing quietly. He was a decidedly affectionate person, to the very center of him, and Chris felt suddenly immeasurably sad that he’d been hidden away in this terrible gilded prison, ripped from showing just how sweet he really was, forbidden from receiving any true ounce of love in return.

It was anything but just, and Chris was determined to set things right.

Settling in a loose embrace, bunched lace and open trousers, legs twined, they stared at each other, Tom’s cheeks still flushed. His chest rose and fell with quick, excited breaths, brushing back Chris’s hair, fingers lingering on his face. “Everything is different. You felt different, when you came. And your hand felt different from mine, when you touched me.” Pressing their palms together, he sighed. “So much larger. Rougher. Scarred.” Brow bent, he studied the small nicks Chris had garnered over the years, flecks of skin that showed a lighter color than the rest of him, pale white.

“And it’s like you’re made of porcelain,” he answered, staring at Tom’s smooth, soft skin. But Tom’s eyes sank low.

“Porcelain that rots with dark.” He touched his collarbone, careful not to press too hard on the bruises. Chris placed his hand over it.

“I can’t wait for these to be gone. For you to be unhurt.”

“Will you…be around long enough to see that?” He didn’t look at Chris, his voice lilting just enough to show how interested he was in his answer.

“You know I will,” Chris said softly, looking at him with all of the conviction he could feel brewing in his belly. “I’m in it now. Like I said.”

Relief softening his face, Tom exhaled and hugged him tightly, lying there on the very bed where so many of his horrors had been made reality. Chris could only hope that things would change for them both, that Tom would be free of the need to use his body as repayment to a woman crueler than the freezing desert night winds, and that Chris might be able to stop running for once, from a past riddled with death. After wiping themselves off with a cloth folded on the table and fixing their clothing, they spent the rest of their time together cuddled against the pillows. As if yearning for touch, Tom was eager to retain contact with some part of Chris, liking to hold his hand or curl his toes against the arch of his foot, an arm stretched across Chris’s belly. He was clearly exhausted, fatigue throwing itself thickly on his slim shoulders. With no need to keep his guard up, he nodded to sleep more than once, waking with slurred mumbles and heavy lids.

“I need to take a piss,” Chris muttered as he lit up a cigarette.

Tom scooted to the edge of the bed. “I do, too. There’s a wash room down the hall. Come on.”

Checking for stragglers and seeing no one, they stole down the plush carpet. Tom guided Chris inside, closing the door silently behind him. He relieved himself first, pulling up his lace shift as Chris watched, taking a long drag of smoke, blowing it through his nostrils. Eyes on him, Tom exhaled almost sensually, pupils slowly eclipsing the blue of his eyes. After Chris finished, they returned to their room where Chris pressed Tom up against the wall and kissed him deeply, the boy arching up into him, arms wrapping around his head, as gentle as a girl.

“I can’t wait until I can fuck you,” Chris said a little roughly, and Tom angled his head back to look him in the eyes.

“You can now, you know. You’re paying for it.”

“Not like this. Not until you’re ready.”

“What will make me ready?”

“When you’re not riddled with signs of abuse and hurt, when your little bottom gets a rest. When you will it.”

“That will never happen here, Chris. I’ll never get a break from them, or from her demands.”

“I want to steal you,” he admitted quietly, and Tom laughed, something hard and dark.

“She would find out. She has eyes everywhere. And you can’t want me. I’m filth. I’m corrupted. They’ve killed the best of me.”

Chris stood to his full height. It only made Tom cling to him more. “Don’t say things like that to me.”

“But isn’t it true? Am I not filthy? Am I not changed because of what they’ve done?” His eyes were round and sorrowful again, and it made Chris’s rage at the Madame flare once more. Tom’s mood was becoming dark, his emotions clouded by the ever-present reminder of his life as a forced prostitute, his dependence on a woman he hated.

Chris took his face in both hands. “You are not filth. You are not anything unless you want it. They touch you and it’s like drops of rain on glass. You do not break from something so insignificant.”

Still unconvinced, Tom shrugged half-heartedly, but accepted Chris’s soft kiss with two small fists curled in his shirt. Their dinner was brought to them just before sunset, the deep red of evening casting the room aglow, nearly blood. Eating together on the settee, Tom stared out at the wide expanse of the desert plains, pockmarked with tall, spindly saguaros, so much more imposing up close, thorns several inches long, limbs twisted by wind and storms and time. In the distance, like a black haze of gnats, thunderclouds gathered in a swirl.

“You won’t forget about me?” Tom whispered in the half-dark, eyes on the bits of food left before them, fingers busy pulling at a loose purple thread on the sofa arm, damaging it. But anything of the Madame’s could burn for all Chris cared. As the first strikes of lightning began raining down on the sierras, he brought Tom’s hand up to his lips and kissed the knuckles.

“When I first thought about seeing you, I didn’t know what kind of set up you had here. Maybe you were perfectly happy. Maybe she spoiled you and it was a beneficial relationship for you both. But there was something about the way you moved, a dragging, like you weren’t even in this world anymore, it gave me pause. Made me reconsider. And after that first visit, I haven’t been able to stop thinking…of all she’s put you through against your will. For her gain. Profiting off yours and the other girls’ sexual exploitation. How she’s hurt you. I have to be honest with you, Tom. I’ve never taken on these services. I like the gamble of cards and billiards, and I like a hard-won drink, but I took the loving of women, and less often men, in quieter and less obvious ways.” He felt Tom’s eyes slide sideways at him, but he kept his gaze on the brewing storm. The window faced the barren lands south of town, where no buildings could be seen, where one might believe they were alone in the world. “I came back because I won’t be able to live with myself knowing you were still chained here. I might have left by now, if not for having seen you. I might be just a fading memory in the lives of these people. Another ghost in the wind.”

Tom swallowed loudly, fingers tightening in his grasp, and Chris felt the skitter-thump of a pulse over his knuckles. A gust of wind buffeted the side of the building, rattling the windowpane, making Tom jump slightly. It was all Chris needed to reach across the seat and pull him into his lap. The boy curled himself on him, hugging him around his back, lips at the pulsing vein of Chris’s neck. He cradled his head, patted his golden curls.

“I don’t want you afraid. I don’t want you panicked. And I would never forget you, my sweet bird, or leave you behind. When I leave, you’re coming with me.”

Tracing the shell of his ear, Tom whispered, “Where will we go?”

Chris wasn’t really sure. “You afraid of horses?”

“Not really, no. I rode fairly frequently back home.”

“Well, my horse is more of a beast than anything else. His name is Bullet.”

“Is he mean?”

“Sometimes.”

“He won’t like me, then.” It was a blunt statement, resigning himself to the idea.

“Maybe he’ll love you,” Chris replied softly, and Tom nestled against him with a sigh. “He’ll take us anywhere we need to go. He’s a mountain, and everything else is but stones under his hooves.”

When their day together came to an end, Chris could tell it took all of Tom’s will not to cleave himself to Chris and sob at him to stay. It was with quiet, swimming tears and clenched fists that he extracted himself from Chris’s arms and stood off to the side while Chris buckled on his gun belt and pulled on his boots. His hat was last, looking down at Tom from under the brim of it, the steeled jaw and distant eyes, refusing to meet his.

“Babe—,” Chris started, taking a step toward him, but Tom held up a hand, taking an equal step back.

“Don’t,” he said, voice warbled. “I touch you again and I won’t be able to let go.”

Chris dropped his hands. “No kiss then.”

Tom’s face fell, brow softening, lips parting. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to him. “Oh, fuck it,” he whispered vehemently and strode across the space between them. Taking Chris’s face, he stood on his tiptoes and crashed their mouths together, moaning sweetly when their tongues brushed. Gathering him up felt as good to Chris as those first few gallops on Bullet, tearing away from the inevitable danger that always found him. And just as he knew that every mile put between himself and his enemies, every inch he closed between himself and Tom was just as right, just as necessary.

He broke away and planted another dozen kisses on Tom’s cheeks and forehead, promising he would return, he would take him away from this place, to wait for him.

“I will. I will, I will,” Tom gasped, nails digging into his back, lace dress dragging over the tops of his boots. And before he changed his mind about hauling the boy over his shoulder and shooting their way free, Chris set him down as gently as he could, spun on his heel and left.


	8. Examination and Burial

**Tom:**

Every turn, every blink, every single step came with the silent threat of a stab in the dark, anticipating with dread that anyone might be able to read the secret in his heart like words on a page. But it didn’t stop him from smiling like mad in bed at night, or slapping his hand over his mouth in the tub to stifle a sudden giggle, soap suds and water a dripping mess. It was hard not to let his brimming happiness show when around others, hard not to grin stupidly at the mere thought of Chris’s body heat and horse smell and clean sweat and sunshine and the good solid earth of him. It wouldn’t do to have spent an entire day with a stranger and emerge transformed out of his former gloom. If Chris was honest in his promise to come back for Tom – and he had to be, he just _had_ to be – then Tom would lend no help in leaving hints as to what became of him, when he inevitably disappeared.

The only one who knew was Eve.

“He didn’t touch you?” she asked in a disbelieving whisper the very next night, helping Tom turn down the bed.

“Well, he did,” he admitted shyly, trying not to become distracted by the memory of Chris’s hand wrapped around his erection. “But he didn’t penetrate me.”

She stood blinking for a solid moment before snapping back to focus. “Is he a eunuch?”

He almost burst into laughter, but stopped himself at the last second. “Heavens no. I felt him there, too. He’s…” he shrugged with a heavy blush. “He’s definitely whole.”

Sliding in under the covers, Eve fluffed the pillows and drew the sheets up to her chest. Her long hair was braided down her back, a coil of dark rope. Chased by the chill on the floor, Tom hurried in beside her. Turning to him, she stared at him quietly. “Do you like him, Tom?”

He glanced out the window, pitch black with intermittent lashes of lightning to blind. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m afraid to.”

“He’s given you hope.”

“The same can be said about you.”

“But I can’t free you. Because where would we go?” Their never-ending question.

Tom sighed and brushed away his doubts. “We would have each other, regardless.”

“Regardless, even here.”

Silent, they lay facing each other, breaths tufting gently. She took his hand. “Please be careful, Tom. You wouldn’t want to trade one jailer for another.”

He let this sit between them, and then he said, “But Eve, answer me truthfully. When you were with us in that room…did you sense menace or threat from him?”

The dark was so dense he could barely see the flick of white from her eyes when she blinked. “All cowboys are dangerous,” she eventually said. “Otherwise they’d be farmers, or grocers, or any other harmless man that is entirely capable of great violence nevertheless. But towards you? No, I sensed no threat.”

Cupping her cheek, he felt the heat of her, the life that kept her with him. “Would you come with us, Eve? When we left? Would you leave her?”

A longer pause, her mind whirring almost frantically. “A part of me wants to, if only for the peace of mind to be with you, to know we are together and safe. But another part, a bigger part, wants to be where she is the moment the light goes out in her eyes and I know that she’s finally, irrevocably dead.”

**

He told himself not to panic when he heard no word from Chris in the days following their last visit. He could only assume that Chris was making plans, preparing for how they would make their escape. Any other thoughts, like how maybe Chris had already left, were too much to bear.

The Madame, in a surprising move, told him he wouldn’t be seeing any customers for the next short while – up to a week, she said – due to call from a doctor.

“A doctor?” Tom stuttered, still wary of looking her in the eye after his last encounter with her before his beating. But then he remembered the conversation he’d eavesdropped on with her gunman, and he wished he hadn’t been so quick to question her. He didn’t want to fuel the fodder that woke him from nightmares of her hellfire eyes.

“He can’t call on us until the end of the week. You’ll resume your duties after he examines you and the other girls.”

“None of us will be working?” He simply couldn’t believe it.

The Madame turned on her heel very slowly, back stiff as a board, looking down her prim nose at him. The skin on the back of his neck tightened with fear. “No, Tom. None of you will be working. Not until I can verify you’re clean. Now leave me, you bothersome flea.”

He fled her room, nearly colliding with one of the gunmen allowed to prowl the property, their supposed protection. The man grabbed his elbow to steady him, but then slowly tightened his fingers, a Cheshire grin spreading his lips.

“Well, if it isn’t the dainty prince,” the man said, and Tom remembered suddenly the cook having called him that very thing, and wondered if perhaps she had ratted him out to the gunman. “Shouldn’t you be in your room?”

 _Which one_ , Tom nearly bit out, but didn’t. “The Madame needed me for something. I was just leaving.”

“Won’t run away again, piglet? Bring us a little bit of excitement around here?” His grip on Tom’s arm was turning painful, a sharp tourniquet around his thin bicep. Trying to tug free got him nothing but a yank closer and a yellow sneer. “I’m watching you, dainty prince. One wrong move and it’s me and you in that alley again.”

What did that mean? That he would beat him senseless again, or was there an undercurrent of sexual threat there, too? Refusing to budge even an inch, Tom stared at the man until he was let go, blood rushing back into his arm. Hurrying down the hall, he waited until he was out of sight before rubbing the sore spot gently, knowing it would bruise dark before night.

With no customers to see, Tom and Eve kept busy cleaning and sorting the laundry, helping strip and redress the beds. They stretched their limbs every morning, washing their faces and rinsing their mouths and kissing each other’s cheeks very gently before leaving the safety of their room. The downstairs parlor remained open, music and clinking glasses and rumble of men’s voices rising to the rafters and seeping into the upper floors, but by using the hidden hallway they avoided looking at the gambling and drinking fray, even if it might warrant a glimpse of Chris. Tom was confident he would return. He wouldn’t risk disappointing himself by not spotting him in the crowd, or begin to harbor negative thoughts about his last encounter with him. If anything, it was what helped sustain him in the time after. He slept much easier in the days untouched by the men, his bruises fading a little more each day, despite the fresh ones shaped like fingers on his arm.

After their breakfast one morning, the Madame called them into her bedroom, a few short of two dozen girls and Tom, dressed in their shifts of pastel lace that hardly concealed some of the more visible marks of their customers’ attentions.

“In just a few minutes Doctor Avery Roebuck will be visiting with each of you to examine your bodies for signs of disease. You will obey him, and keep quiet. Now go line up.”

Tom kept his face neutral, knowing that to confess to the crueler habits of the Madame to a simple town doctor wouldn’t do any of them any good. From the sound of her conversation with the hired gun the other night, the doctor might not even want to be here at all, much less help them. Her man must have made good on her threat to convince the doctor to visit even a well-furnished brothel without protest – whatever violent means necessary.

They waited single file in the hallway outside the Madame’s door as one at a time they were ushered back into her bedroom and examined by an older, rotund man who carried a black medical bag and a scowl Tom took to mean he meant serious business. One by one the line shortened, the girls staying for several long minutes, and then slipping back out looking relieved but slightly clueless. The Madame would no doubt be the only one to receive a full report if any of them were infected, the removal of any of the diseased to be done in secret. Evangeline went before Tom, her chin high, shoulders back, long hair swaying as she strode into her mother’s bedroom and closed the door. Tom waited with bated breath, nervous about how the man would examine him, if he would look upon Tom with revulsion, or worse, not even look him in the eye. When Eve emerged, she went quickly to him and took both his hands.

“He’s kind,” she whispered. “And gentle. He told me I was clear.”

“Thank God,” Tom breathed. She patted his cheek and assured him she would be waiting back in their room. The Madame was luckily not present during the evaluation, but the room was vaguely threatening nevertheless. A sheet was draped over her center table, a makeshift examining bed where the doctor stood washing his hands in a bowl.

“A boy,” he said rather uselessly when he spotted Tom. “Rather peculiar. But boys are just as susceptible to sickness as girls are. Come on up here.” He patted his hands dry on his coat and then went to stand beside Tom, who sat up on the table. “I’ll check your mouth, penis, and anus. All very quick. No bother to anyone.”

Except me, Tom thought, but held still as the man took his chin in dry, papery-skinned hands, turning his head first left, then right, feeling around his neck and peering into his eyes. It all felt entirely too medical to be even remotely personal, and he felt his heartbeat begin to slow as his stress abated. He opened his mouth wide and allowed Roebuck’s fingers to slip in and feel along his gums, lifted his tongue and then stuck it straight out, all per instructed by the doctor. He raised his arms and was poked and prodded in the sensitive pit just beneath, his thin tufts of hair ticklish under the man’s touch. Putting his full hand on Tom’s sternum, he was told to take a deep breath and he did, releasing it slowly, the doctor’s ear against his spine.

“Lift your, erm, dress,” Roebuck said a little uncomfortably, but his face remained void of color, no blushing for a doctor so late in his practice. Shimmying the lace shift up to his hips, Tom let it gather at his waist, still holding it over his privates as he stared at the floor and waited for further instruction. Roebuck indicated the table behind him. “It’s best if you lie down for this.”

Staring up at the ceiling was moderately better, his every sense fully aware of the doctor moving near his hips. But when his penis was lifted, he didn’t so much as flinch. There was no intention to violate him, and he felt himself relax even further. The man studied the root of his cock and slipped the foreskin down to stare at the tip, but even Tom could see he was perfectly healthy, his color a pale pink and clear of sores. Next were his balls, lifted and rolled around, then placed down again.

“Please turn over.”

It was only now that his heart began a skitter-thump of rising anxiety, but he slowly turned on his side and used his elbow to brace his weight before lying flat on his stomach. Cool air rushed up his bare legs and he couldn’t help clenching his bottom, eyes squeezed shut in anticipation. The doctor patted the back of his thigh gently.

“It’s alright. Just a quick examination and we’ll be done. Take a deep breath.”

Tom did, inhaling through his nose and exhaling between his lips, face burning red when the doctor spread him and touched around his entrance.

“Slightly enflamed from overuse. Some tearing, but you are healing. Do you use any salve, after you’re done working? To help with the ache?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “All of us do. It soothes. Plus I wash myself after every…customer.”

Roebuck hummed. “Good. I suggest you continue doing that. Alright, you can sit up now.”

“Am I okay?” he couldn’t help but ask, fearing that the touch of over a dozen men would no doubt leave him tainted and spoiled, just as he’d told Chris.

“You are,” the doctor said, returning to the ceramic bowl and carrying it to the window. He flung it open and spilled the water out, not seeming to care if it fell on some poor unsuspecting passerby. But when no shouts of anger followed, Tom let out a slow breath. Filling the bowl with fresh water, Roebuck dunked his hands in and started scrubbing with soap. “You could do well with a break from it, but considering the voracity of the woman in charge, I’m afraid I can’t help you much there.”

A sudden thought came to Tom, one that was glaring and ugly, but it filled him with sudden hope.

“But what if you could help me,” he said quietly, daring to lift his eyes and meet those of the doctor. Roebuck flicked his hands and dried them with a towel, turning to Tom with peaked brows. When he said nothing, Tom hurried on. “What if you told her I was sick? She’ll turn me loose.”

“Son, what you’re suggesting is gross malpractice. I cannot lie about your health to your employer. Especially the one you’ve got.”

Tom flinched. “She is not my employer. This is _indentured servitude_.” He didn’t mean for his voice to warble, but he was suddenly breathless and the edges of his vision flickered and then he was swaying where he sat. A wide palm cupped his head and slowly lowered him to the hard surface of the table. The doctor leaned in close.

“Easy now. Focus on me. Take a deep breath, young man. You’ll be just fine.” Lifting his eyelids, he peered into each one and felt the heartbeat at Tom’s throat. “It’s flying,” he said, a little surprised. Sight blurred, head swimming, Tom moaned and turned his face away, hands coming up to protect himself. The doctor kept a hand at his neck, two fingers pressed to his fluttering pulse, until Tom’s vision slowly cleared and he rose up on an elbow. The doctor moved to help.

“Let’s get you sitting up now.” Hands on his shoulders, he guided him to a sitting position. “Follow my finger. Good. Take two deep breaths in and out slowly.” Heart racing, Tom clutched his chest and tried to settle his breathing, panting through the rush of light in his head. But he kept his eyes glued on the doctor, determined to settle his nerves. “Easy. In and out. Good gracious, you’re wound tighter than a drum.”

There was a sudden knock on the door and then the Madame strode in, closing it behind her. There was a storm on her brow, eyes flashing. “What is taking so long?”

Doctor Roebuck, keeping a hand on Tom’s shoulder, turned to her. “Madame, this boy is on the verge of collapse. His heart is as fast as a hummingbird’s wings, flushed with nerves.”

Stepping closer, she met Tom’s eyes for a brief moment before he dropped them low. “Yes, but is he diseased?”

Tom searched the doctor’s face, hoping he might do him this favor, but the man wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“He is not,” he ended up saying, a little stiffly. “But he’s exhausted and quite near a kind of breakdown. I recommend bed rest and time away from customers until he sorts out.”

She sniffed out a quick laugh, coming to stand directly beside Tom, wrapping her hand around his wrist. The gesture was small, but inherently threatening, and Tom’s every instinct screamed at him to pull away. “And how long do you suggest he not work?” Words clipped and a little lilting, Tom could tell she was mightily amused and not at all interested in the doctor’s answer. His heart fell.

“Two weeks,” Roebuck said, standing his ground. They were nearly eye to eye, and Tom felt caught like a fawn in the clutches of two growling lions.

“Two—,” she started and then laughed a high trickle, cheeks flushing with mirth. She waved her hand at the doctor. “You may go.”

Roebuck drew himself up, affronted. “Go? I have more girls to see.”

“I said to _leave_ ,” the Madame shot back.

“In this town I am a man of upstanding repute, Madame, and while you may think that just because your establishment draws the most clientele that you are allowed to treat the rest of us like dirt, you are gravely mistaken. I was summoned here by those brutes of yours and I have a job to do, which is to ensure the workers of this house remain healthy. I would thank you to leave me to my duties and remove yourself from this room until I am finished so that I may return to the more respectable side of the tracks and forget you ever exist.”

Mouth agape, Tom stared at the man as if he had just spewed fire but another glance at the Madame confirmed just how burning the doctor’s words indeed were. She was red-faced again, quietly furious, visibly trembling as her eyes flicked over Roebuck’s face. But the man was smugly distant, already turning from her.

“You’re flushed, Madame. Near hysterical. I suggest you have a lie-down yourself.”

He might as well have smacked her, her recoil was so great. A terse moment passed where the doctor bent over his medical bag and the Madame stalked to the door and tore out, slamming it behind her. Tom jumped, pushing his dress down over his knees.

“She’ll kill you,” he whispered, slipping down to the floor.

Roebuck scoffed. “What’s that woman going to do? Nothing. But as for you. I am serious about that bed rest. Your pulse was quite elevated. You’re under extreme duress here. And listen, I’m terribly sorry I can’t be of more help to you. I hope she listens to my suggestion and allows you time to recuperate your strength.”

That seemed to be the end of it, so Tom thanked him quietly and let himself out. The last few girls seemed bored leaning up against the wall, but all smiled at him as he breezed by. He hardly noticed. He needed to find Eve.

**Chris:**

The first thing he needed to do was make sure he could reach Bullet without any trouble. He found out the kid’s name was Billy, and he happily led Chris down the aisle between the stalls to the one in the corner, kept apart from the others.

Bullet flicked his tail in annoyance at the sight of Chris, the stall barely holding his massive body.

“Don’t get all huffy with me,” he muttered, scratching the horse between his ears. “You take him out for a stretch?”

“Every day,” the kid said. “He makes the other animals nervous, so I’ll clear the corral and run him in circles by himself.”

This surprised Chris. “He lets you lead him?”

“Heck no,” the boy laughed, “I’ll just run with him until I get tired, but he’ll go on his own. Sure’s got lots of energy, this one. I had to move a mare that was starting her heat because he almost knocked down the walls to get to her.”

“Sounds about right. Listen, I’m gonna need to leave town here real soon, real fast. You don’t keep any of the pens locked do you?”

“Sure do. One key for all of them. Keep it right here on my belt.” His eyes got nervous quickly and he took a step back from Chris. “Hey, mister, you ain’t thinking of robbing me, are you?”

“What, and steal back all those dollars I’ve been giving you? It ain’t like that, kid. I just wanna know if I can grab my horse and go when I need to.”

“You want me to leave his pen unlocked? What if someone else tries to steal him?”

“He won’t let ‘em. But I’m gonna need you to do something for me. From now on, can you saddle him up at night? That’s probably when I’ll take off.”

“Well, I don’t know, mister. I got nearly a dozen animals to care for—.”

“I’ll give you two dollars per day now.”

“Okay!”

Chris smiled. The kid was good, but he was new at this game. Had he stuck it out more, he could have wrangled another dollar from him. “Much obliged, Billy. I’ll be by to check on him more often now. He’s an ornery beast. He ain’t tried to bite you yet?”

“Aw, he’s a big faker. He’ll snap at the air right next to you. But he’s never bitten me. Likes to lick my face actually.”

“Means he likes you.” Billy and Bullet, Chris thought, amused. Unlikeliest of friends.

The kid’s smile was big and sweet, and Chris hoped life out in these parts didn’t turn him into something mean and broken. He wondered suddenly how Tom had been as a child, and the thought alone tightened his chest. Slender little thing, maybe, great bubbling laughter, soft flushed cheeks, knobby knees, freckled from the sun. Wasn’t much different from how Tom was now actually, save for the deep despair running darkly on his brow.

Not for long.

Over the next several days, Chris kept close to the boarding house, leaving only to procure items he knew he and Tom would need while traveling through the desert. A pair of fresh blankets, a spare change of clothes – big enough for him and small enough for Tom – a box of matches, an extra canteen for water, salve for burns. Belen watched him with narrowed eyes whenever he returned to her building carting supplies, not saying much whenever she fed him, but watching always. Apart from that time he overheard some runt cowboy get aggressive with her when she requested her rent money – Chris ended up slamming into the man when he started getting physical with her, throwing him bodily into the street, crouching over him to warn very quietly that he better not lay his hands on a woman like that again, much less the one that houses and feeds him – Chris hadn’t really heard her talk. But she thanked him that day, heavily accented and a bit shy, but hard-edged as she eyed the man on the street, dusting himself off and scowling in their direction.

She was calculating and determined, and hadn’t made her way alone without a good amount of grit, and for that he respected her.

“You leave?” she said when he came down for lunch on Friday. He sank heavily into a chair by her rickety table, his legs splaying out the other side. Removing his hat, he hung it on the peg of another chair and sighed.

“Yeah. Real soon.”

She pointed her spatula at him. “You stay and work for me. I pay you.”

Chris smiled. “What, like a bodyguard?”

Belen shrugged. “Protect and no rent.”

It was honestly a pretty decent offer. Live and eat free of charge in exchange for clearing the place of troublesome tenants and generally making himself as threatening a presence to anyone Belen needed him to was something Chris really had no problem with. He liked Belen. Underneath the hard shell of her personality, she was kind enough, her smiles rare but warm. And she shared her smokes with him. But if he would ever consider accepting her offer, she would have to know about Tom.

He tipped back on the hind legs of his chair and brought out his blade to whittle at the stick of wood he’d picked up from the kindling pile outside. “You know, I can’t say just now that I won’t do that for you. It’s mighty nice of you to offer, and I thank you. But if it turns out I can stay and help you out around here, you’ll need to know that I’ll be bringing someone in to live with me.”

She stirred the pot on the stove, but cut him a high-browed glance. “Wife?”

“Something like that. Only, my wife is a boy.” He raked off a thick layer of bark, letting it drift loose to lie curled on the floor. He met her eyes. “Understand?”

Humming, she shrugged and nodded. “Some boys very pretty. Make good wives. _Yo no juzgo_.”

Chris grinned. He loved it when she broke out in Spanish. “What’s that mean now, darlin’?”

“Mean, I not judge.”

Chris’s eyes flickered low, carving the blade deeper into the bark, outlining the wings. “All right, then,” he murmured, smiling faintly. She started up her humming again and bent to take out the bread baking in the oven.

No. He didn’t just like Belen. He adored her.

**

Tom’s soft words about how he’d ended up in the Madame’s grip stayed with Chris in the days following their last encounter. Especially his confession about how his parents had died, and how helpless he’d felt having to abandon them in the desert to save his own life. Borrowing a shovel from Belen, Chris took Bullet out just before sunset and followed the direction Tom had said he’d come from. He scanned through several acres before he finally found the metal spokes sticking out of the shifting sands. The wagon was a broken heap on two remaining wooden wheels, buffeted by winds and storms.

The sun had laid its claim on the skeletons he found beneath the wagon bed. Strips of hair and skin still clung to the skull, but nothing too disturbing.

He dug into the ground for the better part of an hour, until the hole was good and deep, and then he pulled the remains out from under the creaking wagon. Examining the bodies for anything that might mean something special to Tom, he eventually found a necklace tangled in the blond hair of Tom’s mother. The clasp was broken, torn perhaps in the struggle that had preceded the woman’s death, and hidden from the scavengers that had picked the corpses of all other valuables. He pocketed the necklace and buried first the father and then the mother, laying them side by side. Covering them with the pebbled sand took less time than removing it had, and he was back in his room just after dark. Working by lamplight, he untangled the gold chain and reattached the scuffed gold figure of a delicate bird. He wasn’t sure if there was a jeweler in town who might be able to fix the broken clasp, but he would look into it the following day.

First came the issue of the men guarding the Sapphire Raven.

There were six of them, the savvy pistoleers the Madame hired on for protection of herself and her building, and by extension the charges in her care. He avoided going into the saloon itself, afraid of seeing Tom escorted to the second floor landing and knowing what other men would be doing to him. But he didn’t want to spend too much time away from him for fear that Tom would believe he’d been abandoned. Staking out the place meant a lot of visiting the buildings around it, quieter saloons and shops that offered storefront windows where he could gauge the interior of the Sapphire Raven without drawing too much attention to himself. Just because there was no formal police presence in town at the moment didn’t mean things couldn’t turn ugly in the space of a second. It wasn’t helping that he kept catching other men around town looking at him strangely, with barely veiled recognition, staring just an instant too long without nodding hello or touching their hat in greeting. The last thing he needed was to be identified and cornered by a bunch of people who thought they were doing the world some good by approaching him with wild – albeit it, accurate – accusations. But he needed to focus solely on Tom.

The more he studied the Madame’s building, the less sense it made. He knew the inner parlor well, the dimensions fitting with what showed from the street out front. But the alley behind it revealed a depth to the building that made him wonder if there weren’t passages not visible from the main room.

Staring up at it, he was caught in contemplation when the hair on the back of his neck rose in warning, the scratch of a footstep behind him.

“Go on and turn, nice and slow,” a man’s voice said. Keeping his hands open, Chris turned to face the same man whose knuckles had been busted just before Chris had found out about Tom’s beating. Anger flared to the center of his chest, but he kept his breathing steady, his face calm.

The gun was cocked and aimed right at the center of Chris’s chest, level and impressively still.

“It’s you, then,” the man said. “Mr. Billiards Player.”

Chris nearly scoffed. How typical for a lackey to take on his mistress’ obnoxious nicknames as his own.

The man jutted his chin behind Chris. “Entrance is up front.”

Chris still said nothing.

“Thinking of sneaking in? Stealing one of the girls? But wait a minute. You ain’t interested in one of them now, are you? You want something a little more…tight.”

The muscles of Chris’s middle finger twitched, but he still made no movement. The man grinned, all yellow teeth and red gums.

“Too bad they ain’t working this week. The boss is cleaning shop.”

Chris’s brow tightened just fractionally. What did that mean? Tom wasn’t seeing customers? None of the girls were?

“Works out just fine for me, ‘cause I’ll take that pretty little prince of hers and fuck him mys—.”

Quick as a blink, Chris’s hand shot down to his holster and took hold of his gun, bringing it up in one smooth motion, his left hand rising and snapping the hammer back just as he squeezed the trigger. It took less than a second, but the shot was true.

The man’s neck cracked back, a dark hole blooming red in the middle of his forehead. Legs buckling, the body thudded to the ground, gun clattering uselessly to the side. Red mulch and bone splattered the ground in a wide arc.

Chris took a look around and saw no one. Good. He left the man and his gun just as they’d fallen, holstering his own and strolling out of the alley as calmly as he could. He was uneasy about what the man had told him. It seemed out of character that the Madame would cease her skin business for any reason at all. From what he could tell, the downstairs parlor still serviced liquor and games, but no girls? Was Tom safe? Fisting a hand, he felt the knuckles pop as he ambled down the street, thinking to visit Bullet before returning to his room. The horse always soothed him in ways he was unable to describe.

On the wooden sidewalk across the street from the Sapphire Raven, he nearly collided with a heavyset man carrying a black bag. Skirting around him distractedly, the man hurried on, muttering on about that ‘damned lady boss’ and her ‘insulting manner’.

“Excuse me,” Chris said, and the man blinked around at him, silhouette studded in dust and buzzing gnat wings. The sun was setting, making him squint suspiciously at Chris, drawing his bag tighter against his leg.

“Yes?”

“You just been in the Raven?” he asked, inclining his head to the building across the street. The man, a doctor judging by his bag, spared it the briefest of glances and then continued on his way.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Chris caught up to him and fell into step. “Can I ask why? Is someone sick?”

“What’s it to you? Got a woman in there you filled with child?”

“No. But I am hoping you could tell me if you saw the boy.”

The man stopped and studied him seriously, eyes taking on more of an interest. “Who are you?”

“No one. I’m just asking about the boy. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Yes…yes I attended to him. The only boy she has in her service.”

Dread filled his belly like black stones, but he drew himself up and tried not to show it. “Is he alright? What’d he need seeing for?” He was seconds from storming into the place and tearing it apart to locate Tom.

The doctor sighed and started back up the path, slower now that Chris was with him. “Normally I wouldn’t speak of my clients’ business with the likes of people like you.” Chris shrugged, not easily put out. “But I personally could care less what happens to that woman. You, on the other hand, seem to have some interest in the boy, so it’s no skin off my nose if her dirty laundry makes its way around town. She dispatched her ruffian thugs to persuade me to visit her establishment and check her workers for disease. I wasn’t expecting a boy, but suddenly there he was. In a dress of all things.” Chris felt his heart actually twist with yearning. “I checked him. He’s healthy enough, has good lungs and teeth, and he’s not diseased. Though he has some slight tearing from, well, overuse.” He shook his head and dabbed at his temple with a handkerchief. “I told that woman the boy needed bed rest for at least two weeks. Who knows if she’ll listen to me.”

Chris turned to him, startled. “Bed rest? But you just said he was fine.”

The doctor stopped under a striped alcove erected between a shop of women’s clothing and children’s toys. The shade threw his wrinkles and heavy jowls into sharp contrast. “Look, young man. That boy is frightened, and rightly so. Practically fainted on the table. I’ve never seen someone’s heart beat so fast who wasn’t moments away from a collapse or in a blind panic. He’s able to recover more or less now, but I’m not sure what kind of health he’ll be in, physically or mentally, should he remain there much longer.”

Heart racing, Chris turned to look at the distant Sapphire Raven. Somewhere in there was Tom, scared and distraught, thinking perhaps that Chris may have abandoned him. Beside him, the doctor watched him closely, fat fingers fiddling with his dusty handkerchief.

“You’re going to go in there and what, bust him out? Save him? Give the Madame a piece of your mind? Take care, young man. Those men of hers, they’re ruthless, above the law.” He scoffed. “Not that we have any here. They catch you in their sights and you’re good as dead.”

Chris pulled out a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and struck a match to light it. Out on the street, voices were beginning to rise in excitement, a few people rushing off toward the far end of the street where the Sapphire Raven threw a growing crowd of people into shadow. Dragged out from the back alley looked to be a body. Exhaling a plume of smoke, Chris shook his head.

“No, doctor. It’s really the other way around.” He met the man’s startled eyes, flicking between the scene down the street and to Chris with newfound awareness. Chris patted his shoulder in gratitude and then continued up the sidewalk, boots thudding hollowly on the cracked floorboards as others ran past him to stare at the newly dead.


	9. Wooden Dove and Note

**Tom:**

There really wasn’t anything as terrifying to Tom as the raised voices of men. Now that he’d had some distance from the physical touch of men, his ears were opening up to the other sounds in the Madame’s establishment. The second floor was quiet as a tomb, every door flung open to air out during their intermission. But below, in the smoky parlor, the crowd of men grew. Shouts at the billiards and faro tables were often heard, winners or losers making their success or plight known. Any day now and someone would draw their gun, he was sure of it. It was a miracle that nobody had been shot so far, but it seemed that taking from the men the means to slake their lusts with the women had only served to agitate them, a sort of electric and menacing air brewing just beneath the spotless chandeliers hanging from the ceilings.

But now that he and the girls had been examined, Tom imagined they would be put back to work soon. So far nobody had been thrown out. Perhaps they’d all been determined free of illness. It was a relief for them all, in any case, most of the girls bundling blankets and pillows on the floor of his and Evangeline’s room that same night after the doctor’s visit, as if sleeping together would shore up their belief that no one could steal them by force.

The Madame hadn’t spoken to him again since the day of her little spat with the doctor, her doorway at the end of the hall always closed but he could feel her heavy presence just beyond, her anger palpable even from inside his and Eve’s room. He couldn’t help but wonder if the commotion – shouts and clamor about a dead body – heard outside earlier was the reason for the sudden influx of customers in the parlor downstairs. Word was that one of her men had been involved in a street fight and been gunned down. But that seemed the wrong way to phrase it, he thought, remembering two of the servants whispering about how her gunman had only one bullet hole in him, straight between the eyes. The remaining five men were visibly on edge, prowling the upper floors with rage purpling their brows, hands braced on their pistols as if their friends’ killer was sleeping under their very roof. Tom tried not to let it show, but he was secretly pleased the man was dead. Not only having beaten him to within an inch of his life, but always menacing Tom with his sickening leer and painful grip, the danger in his eyes coming close to a boil until one day he might have truly harmed him. Still, he kept quiet, like all the girls, eyes down whenever he passed the other men, hoping not to incite their wrath. Even if she hadn’t specifically given him permission to follow Doctor Roebuck’s orders, Tom stayed close to his and Eve’s room, taking naps and focusing on his breathing as he stared at the ceiling and tried to recall the scent of Chris’s neck. Just as he thought the monotony would split his brain in two, Eve slammed into their room on the fourth evening, startling him from his doze.

“Christ, Eve! What is it?”

She stood with her back to the closed door, chest jumping with frantic breaths. Her braid was coming undone, wisps of her dark hair framing her face like spider webs. But it was her grin that frightened him the most, almost manic, eyes bright with a fever borne of excitement and not sickness.

“Tom,” she gasped, racing across the room and pulling him to his feet. He took her face in both hands, feeling the pump of her heart in the hot blood just beneath her porcelain skin.

“What, darling? Are you alright?”

“He’s here,” she said breathlessly. “Blow out the candle. Now.”

“Who’s here? The doctor? What are you doing?” Busy fluffing the pillows and billowing out the sheets so that they laid flat, she went on in quick pants.

“Your cowboy. He’s here.”

His blood sprang to life. “What? Downstairs?” He took a step toward the door, but she snatched his wrist.

“No, Tom! He’s outside, climbing up. I told him where our window was.”

Disbelief clenched his jaw, his words a hissed whisper. “He’s climbing the _wall_?”

She giggled. “Yes! It’s only three floors, Tom. The man is plenty capable. Plus, I spied all five of the Madame’s men in the parlor downstairs, conferring with each other at the bar. Stewing, more like. Are you ready?”

He gulped. Was he? To see Chris again would be a joy, but their proximity to the Madame sent up a flare of warning. “It’s too dangerous. Your mother is just down the hall. How will he get down again? What if—.”

“Shh, my darling. Don’t you worry about any of that, especially her. I was just in to see her now. She’s complaining of a headache, so I gave her some laudanum.” She took his hands, her face lit brightly. Excited for him, he realized. “This is a perfect time for you, Tom. It’s serendipity, really. I was out back helping toss the garbage and I see a tall shadow shift just beside me. If he hadn’t moved, I would never have known he was there! But I recognized him immediately. He’s desperate to see you, Tom. And I will help you. I will make sure you have your time alone with him.”

“B-but what if tonight’s the night? What if he wants me to leave with him?”

“Then you go, sweetheart. You go with him, and you find a way to send me word that you’re happy and safe.”

“Oh, it’s all so sudden. My heart is racing—.”

There was a noise by the window and they both gasped, turning in time to see the low rise of a shadow through the lace curtains. There was hardly any moon, and thank heavens for that. Eve gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and then rustled off to the door. “I’ll be back at midnight. I love you.” And then she was gone, the quiet click of a turned key in the knob the final noise of her departure.

“Love you,” Tom murmured, walking as if in a dream to the window, pulling aside the curtain and staring right into the eyes of his cowboy.

“Mine,” he whispered, smiling, hating the damnable tears that rose in his eyes. But he unlocked the clasp and raised the window wide, reaching for Chris just as he lifted himself silently over the windowsill. His ears were cold, his shirt stiff but fresh, the smell of sand and horse rising off him. Falling against him, Tom wrapped him close and breathed his name. Bumped chins and tumbled steps, window forgotten, Chris hitched Tom around the waist and bent low to kiss his lips, soft and waiting and flush with heat.

“You found me, you found me,” Tom whispered, yanking Chris’s hat off and letting it fall to the floor, carding his fingers through hair soft and cold with moonlight, rasping their cheeks together just because he could.

“I missed you,” Chris said softly. “Been thinking of you since I left. This pretty little face, your smile, how warm and soft you are.”

“Darling, it’s too much. We’ll be caught.”

“We won’t. I’ll be out right quick if I need to. And I wanted to give you something.”

He pulled Tom to the bed, which would have been threatening enough, but Tom’s usual fear evaporated in the presence of this man, his excitement and growing feelings acting like a sponge for his anxiety and suspicion. If Chris had wanted to force sex on Tom, he would have done it already. And besides, Tom had never truly allowed himself to feel this kind of electric magnetism to someone before, and without fear of injury he found he really liked the bubbly sensation in his chest whenever Chris so much as looked at him. He followed him willingly to the bed.

“Here,” Chris said. “Sit.”

Tom sank down beside him. Chris reached into his back pocket and brought out a small item that fit snugly in his big hand. It was dark and smooth, and surprisingly heavy. It felt large in Tom’s palms, cupping it and holding it to his face.

“It’s a dove,” he said with awe, rubbing his thumb over the patterned wings folded closely over the bird’s round body, it’s tiny beak tucked almost demurely to the side. “You made this?”

“I did,” Chris said quietly, eyes never leaving Tom’s face, which he felt grow hotter.

“For me?”

Chris grinned and cupped the back of his head, leaning forward to peck his forehead in a small kiss. “Yes, little bird. For you.”

“I’ll keep it always,” Tom promised, holding the carving close to his belly. In the webby mesh of laced moonlight, Chris looked contemplative and hungry, his eyes edged with a sharpness that made Tom’s spine straighten, chest poked out toward him, breathless all of a sudden.

“Babe,” Chris said, and Tom scooted closer, sliding their palms together. Face softening, Chris wrapped an arm around his back, giving him a squeeze. “It’ll be soon. I have nearly everything ready.”

Tom sat up, excited. “Where will we go?”

“Anywhere. There are towns popping up all over, places where I’ll be invisible and you’ll be free. Where we can live quietly. In peace.”

Smiling, Tom tucked a strand of hair behind Chris’s ear. “Will you become a farmer, my darling? Toil and bring from the earth what we need to survive?”

“I would do anything,” Chris whispered. “To secure for us a good future. But I was thinking the coast. I think you would do well around water. You would bloom under the touch of sea winds.”

Something rosy and tufted with wings erupted behind Tom’s ribs, and falling into Chris took no hesitation, not any longer. Temples brushing, noses nudging, chin lifted to meet the other’s lips, Chris pulled him under the wide bulk of his body and pressed him to the pillows, the dove carving rolling between the sheets. More kisses, and more moans, but the heat magnified each rasp of skin, each breath smothered by eager lips and stifled moans. Hands on hips, pulling, tugging, arch, hush, hush.

“Chris,” he gasped, mouth sliding on silk-wheat hair, Chris’s hips pumping dryly between his legs. His lace shift was bunched around his waist and he felt the enormous length of his handsome cowboy. Rather than shrink back in horror at the pain he knew a large man careless of his girth could no doubt cause, he hugged Chris closer, knowing, inherently, that sex with him would be vastly different – and possibly what he had timidly imagined it would be. Ever since allowing himself to feel for Chris, Tom’s body had been ripe for opportunity to prove it. Hard almost instantly, there was no room for shame or trepidation in that cave in his heart, the fear pushed out by the first flowerings of his desire. Hips lifting, nails digging in, chin bouncing up for kiss after kiss, he behaved in a way perhaps the men he’d thus far encountered had wished he had moved and moaned and yearned for them.

 _No_ , he mouthed against Chris’s temple, delighted that he even could, and did again. _I’m not theirs. I’m his. His._

“I can’t get enough of you,” Chris whispered, dragging his lips from nose to ear, chills erupting over Tom’s skin so that he gasped and bent up, and they rolled to the side and embraced each other tightly.

“And I can’t tell you how unfamiliar this giant sunburst is in my chest,” Tom said, just as quietly. “What is this, Chris? What is it?”

“Sweet darling. It’s your heart.”

They lay in bed together, long legs hanging off the edge, soft-soled feet nudged between cracked and dusty boot heels. He wanted to give more of himself to Chris, to let his erection rub and rub until he fell over that swelling crest, but he couldn’t rid his mind of the anxious itch that the Madame was only down the hall. There was no relaxing with so close a viper. But that didn’t stop his kisses, and Chris didn’t stop him from giving them, bending over him and accepting each one with the full and heavy weight of his warmth. He liked the taste of Chris’s mouth, faintly of liquor and a twist of tobacco and something sweet, like peaches – the way he hauled Tom tight to his chest and ran his big hand up his flank to squeeze his bottom.

The door cracked open a foot and they broke apart, scrambling up just as Chris’s hand snapped to the gun at his waist. It was out of the holster and aimed at the door in the blink of an eye, robbing Tom of his breath. But it was only Eve, clicking the door closed quietly before rushing to their side.

Tom sat up, pulling down his dress. Was it really midnight? “Eve?”

She drew in two deep breaths and then said, “One of the gunmen is on his way up. He broke away from the others, and I was close enough to hear that he’s coming to check on ‘the dainty prince’. I came up the back staircase. But he’ll be here any second.” Pushing back the strands of hair that had fallen loose from her braid, she stared wildly at them, her eyes finally falling steady on Chris.

Standing swiftly, Chris took her by the elbow and guided her to the bed. “Sit here. Tom, you too. You keep quiet, alright?” And then he slipped into the shadows just to the left of the door, directly out of sight.

A solid minute passed, in which he and Eve sat nervously on the bed, hands clasped, eyes wide on the doorway. Any parlor sounds were usually too faded by the distance from the second floor, and the silence only amplified the solid boot thuds in the hallway outside, a leisurely gait, one self-assured that all would be just as it should.

Tom could barely see Chris’s outline along the wall, tall and completely still, leaning in toward the door, but he could still feel his whiskery kisses and heavy weight like a phantom on his limbs, and it made a shiver race through him at the suspense of waiting, wondering what Chris might do.

He’d kill the man, that’s what. And it suddenly occurred to him that Chris might have killed the other one that very afternoon, a single shot to the forehead.

Eve felt him tremble, and squeezed his hand, shot a quick smile at him before opening her mouth to speak in a voice that belied her fear, and his.

“Honestly, Tom, it’s just like I told you. It’s best to brush before bed or else you’ll wake with all these tangles that take forever to pull out.”

The doorknob clicked round and then the man was stepping in, tall figure outlined in the lamplight pouring in from the hallway. Eve gasped and turned around with a look of indignation.

“You call for impropriety now, in addition to the threat of physical violence? Where’s the agreed upon knock?”

The man chuckled, a thin stick of wood rolled over his teeth by a busy tongue, the wet gleam of it in the low light. “I like when they’re riled up a bit. Makes the taking a little more fun, wouldn’t you say?”

Eve huffed, hiding the hand fisted in Tom’s dress behind their turned bodies. Tom said nothing, just stared at the man, hoping to pass unnoticed.

“We’re a man short. One of us has to take his rounds, lest something happens and the dainty prince thinks to run again at the first opportune moment.”

“I won’t run,” Tom whispered, but the man only laughed a little louder.

“Oh, we know a runner when we see one. The fight isn’t out of you yet, so quit your fakin’.”

The floorboard behind him creaked, and the man straightened with a flick of his eyes to the side. But Chris was too fast, the surprise too solid, and just before the man could reach for his gun Chris was at his back, a dark and looming presence that reminded Tom of images from old books in his father’s study, angels and demons, and the shadows and bursts of light that loomed at their heels.

The man’s neck snapped to the side, bone cracking loudly from the naked power of Chris’s hands. But Chris kept the body from sagging to the floor, catching him and holding him so the body wouldn’t thump and give them away.

“Open the window,” he instructed quietly, and Tom and Eve immediately scrambled to their feet, hurtling to the window and throwing it open. Giving the ground below a cursory glance, Chris deemed it sufficient and then tossed the body over the window ledge without a moment’s hesitation. The distant thud still made Tom and Eve flinch. Chris turned back to them, and they inhaled nervously. “Little Bird,” he whispered, and Tom fell easily into his embrace, the feel of firm chest and long arms all he needed to be exorcised of any trepidation.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, the both of you.”

“Oh, hogwash,” Eve whispered, reaching forward and clasping Chris’s wrist. “They are bad men and we aren’t safe with them around. Thank you, Chris. But how will you get rid of the body?”

“Leave that to me. You two bolt this window once I’m gone and get into bed, pretend you’ve been sleeping for hours now. Can you do that?”

They nodded.

“Good. Now who has more access to the house?”

“I do,” Eve said.

“I’ll leave a note for you, in the alley out back. There’s a loose board in the wall just behind the door.”

“A note?” Tom said in a hush, eyes crinkled in worry.

“For when I’ll come get you, little bird. For good.”

With a quick kiss on Tom’s mouth and a gentle nod to Eve, Chris climbed out the window and started his descent. Once he was on the ground, white face cast up at them one last time, they locked the window and hurried under the covers, both shaking from what they’d witnessed.

“He had to do it,” Eve said, finding Tom’s hand between them. “They’ve been getting more and more aggressive. He had to do it, or else the man might have hurt either of us, or both.”

“Do you think he killed the one from this afternoon?”

“Yes,” she breathed, her straight nose bobbing as she nodded. “Now that you mention it, that’s exactly what I think. And the funny thing is, I don’t feel afraid of him for doing it.” She turned to face him, her eyes twinkling in the dark. “Are you, Tom?”

“No,” he whispered sincerely, grateful he wasn’t alone in this. “I’m not afraid of him.”

The night passed with little sleep, both falling into fitful spurts that left them breathless with every jolt into consciousness, eyes wide on the dark room. When dawn finally broke and cast their tired faces in a shawl of gray, he and Eve were strangely calm. They simply gazed at each other, and with a simple nod, stood to face the day. The commotion didn’t immediately break out. After resuming their normal morning duties of straightening beds and bathing, they did their best to look just as startled and confused as everyone else when the first shouts came from the street level about another killing in Silver Dam. Neck snapped, twisted limbs, perhaps the man had fallen? Yes, perhaps he had but really, we would never know.

The Madame was a silent storm of fury as she emerged from her room dressed severely in dark green and black, called her remaining four gunmen up in a voice sharp like a dog’s bark, and then retreated once more. The girls and Tom slipped back into their own respective rooms as the men advanced down the hall, eyes slit in danger, hats low on their brows. It had been days since the doctor’s visit and not one of the girls – or Tom – had been called to entertain customers. It was all very strange and unlike the Madame, ominous even, although he appreciated the time away from the men, his body recovering truly for the first time since he’d landed in this terrible place. His tailbone felt almost normal.

Every morning thereafter, Eve checked the loose board but there was never a note, and Tom’s stomach began to cramp with unease.

It was with a darkening gloom that storm clouds began gathering every evening, clusters of black and grey so dense it was hard to imagine the blue sky behind them, the stars hidden from him at night. The rain would pound on the roof and windows, winds gusting the sides of the building so that the walls heaved and rocked, making the girls who’d crowded into their bedroom scuttle deeper into the blankets and pillows nested on the floor.

“She hasn’t suspected?” Tom whispered into Eve’s ear, the thunder masking his question from the others. In his hand was Chris’s dove carving, stroked to a near shine by Tom’s anxious fingers.

“If she has, she hasn’t told me a word. But she’s been meeting with the four men left. They’re trying to figure out who killed the others.”

“They can’t suspect him,” he said, refusing to say his name when in the company of others. Eve followed his lead.

“I don’t know why they would. There are so many cowboys who pass by these parts. New faces every day. I think he’s safe.”

But it was difficult to say when he couldn’t keep in contact with Chris. With the flesh services on pause, there was really no reason for any of the girls or Tom to be speaking with any men, and so their means of digging out information was severed. And maybe that was the Madame’s entire goal, to strip one from the other, and perhaps root out a culprit. Still, the nightly storms kept most business to a minimum in the parlor, and bad airs were beginning to brew. Several fights broke out, loud crashes and breaking glass that caused the girls to gather at the lip of the hall and peer down through the balcony to the fray below.

And still no Chris. Was he alright? Eve, with eyes pinched with worry, had no answer to give him.

**Chris:**

He wasn’t able to leave a note under the wooden board until almost a week later. There was something suspicious afoot, several men staring at him just a bit too long, recognition making their faces cold. It was prudent to lay low, keep to his bunk, an eye on the comings and goings of the main street. The Sapphire Raven, when he was able to sneak out around dusk, seemed less frequented than before and he wondered why. It was true that the streets were mucked with fresh mud from the rains, and travel by foot was inconvenient to most. Which is why those out and about were the harder looking men on horseback, scowls and sharp eyes and half-cocked guns at their hips. Men just like him.

At the foot of his bed he whittled a new piece of wood, the skin on the back of his neck tightening with fear, one of the few times in his life. Not for himself, but for Tom. Fear that he might not be able to get him out of that place where he was so basely abused, and for what? So some lady could collect shiny coins off his suffering? Chris would kill her before the end of it all, he was sure of it.

He hoped Eve found the note this morning and delivered it to Tom. It had been a simple thing, really, and more fanciful than he’d intended, like out of a fairy story. _Meet me here at sunset._ He couldn’t remember a time when writing something like that would have ever crossed his mind, but meeting the boy had shifted something in the thicker-lined vault of his mind, no less his often ignored heart. A soft embrace, deep inhale at the crook of a long, pale neck, warm snuggles in a bed all their own, chasing away the chill of dawn on a bit of land that they might tend to, the ocean surf a sound constant and soothing in their lives – it suddenly seemed like everything he’d been fighting for his whole life, the wandering and the hustle inevitably leading him to this exact juncture, this exact boy.

And he wasn’t about to let that snake get in his way.


	10. Escape

**Tom:**

There was nothing much to do except sit around and wait with bated breath for the Madame’s ire to lessen and for Chris’s letter to appear. But when it finally did he didn’t know what to do with himself. Eve’s ecstatic grin when she bolted their door and slipped him the crumpled piece of paper – black scrawl like beetle-leg lines telling him to meet Chris in the alley that sunset – spurred his own giant smile and he hadn’t been able to stop since. He’d packed in a small canvas sheath a pair of dresses, warm stockings, two scarves to guard himself from the blowing sands, and the wooden figurine Chris had carved for him.

“I won’t dare step foot in the kitchen this time,” he vowed, still angry about the last time he’d tried to escape.

“No,” Eve said gently, “I doubt he’ll take you away only to let you starve.”

They ate a light lunch of fruit and thinly cut bread, but Tom drank water more than anything, knowing the parching thirst the desert would deliver to him if he wasn’t properly hydrated. Chris had assured him that he had everything prepared, but Tom’s experience at the brink of death was a hard thing to dismiss. He and Eve tried not to be too blatant about their burgeoning affection, so as not to arouse suspicion, but it was hard not to touch her knowing they would be separated possibly forever before the day’s end. And when the time came, they embraced and cried in their bedroom, whispering their love, Eve making him promise he would find a way to let her know he was okay.

“You hear me?” she said in a hush, cupping his head and peering at him with soaked eyes. “You let me know. Somehow.”

“I will,” he said, and accepted her kiss on his forehead.

The sconces were lit low in the hallway when Tom slipped out of his room that evening. He could see the sun’s glare through the curtains – a seeping red, nearly extinguished – but time was running short and he needed to make sure he was ready when Chris arrived for him. Eve was positioned on the balcony overlooking the parlor and very carefully, from behind the flow of her dress, she waved at him to go. Clutching his small bag of spare clothing, Tom slipped down the passage, his bare feet noiseless on the plush rug, and stole into the doorway that led down the hidden staircase. His heart thudded painfully, chest tight with panic, imagining her men – or the Madame herself – close on his heels, ready to snatch him back into their midst. But he made it to the lower level and pushed through the door to the alleyway and into the wet, electric air that burst to life at the start of every rainfall and right into a pair of arms.

“Chris!” he gasped, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Little bird,” came the answer, and he nearly sobbed, giving in to the shudder he’d been suppressing all day. Chris peppered the side of his face and neck with hard kisses, his big hand fisting in his hair, not painful, but with a sweet possession that made Tom’s toes tingle and curl in the dirt to lift himself higher and closer to him. After another quick kiss on the lips, Chris dipped his head to the side and reached for his hand. Hitching up his dress, they sprinted down the alley and into the street leading away from the Madame’s building. His feet became caked in dark mud, the hem of his dress spackled and stained, but his heart was flying! He was running in the near-dark with a man he felt comfortable placing the safety of his life in, away from the place of his dreaded captivity, toward an unknown that would be brighter and more filled with love and light, where no one would touch him unless he wanted.

“No horse just now,” Chris whispered, guiding him off the main street and behind the back edges of the buildings leading from the Raven. He kept Tom tight to his left side, his right hand hovering over his holstered gun. “We’ll hole up at Belen’s until I get a feel for how things turn up.” The desert yawned to their right, vast and daunting in the cooling dark, and Tom squeezed Chris’s hand, angling closer. The shadows shifted with every cutting breeze, the moon a sliver and no good to anyone. Specters began taking shape, of his mother, of his father, gutted and bleeding, the wagon creaking somewhere he couldn’t see, cruel men and their gleaming teeth grinning and ready to snatch him away.

But he shut his eyes tight and trusted Chris to lead him out of the mess his life had become, to where ghosts and vultures held no power. They came around a corner and Tom recognized the building he’d ran up against the first time he’d tried escaping, with its lines of drying laundry and hollow windows. Chris pulled him to a door near the back, small and thin, a service entry, and just as he was guiding Tom through the opening a loud blast sounded and something pinged off the wooden jamb right next to Chris’s head.

Tom yelped and turned back, but Chris shoved him through the door and slammed it closed, leaving him shrouded in darkness.

“No!” he gasped, reaching for the knob. But then a hand slipped over his mouth and he was tugged away from the door. A scent of old roses flooded his nostrils, and he managed to stifle his scream.

“Shh,” came a voice directly before him. “No talk.” She sounded much older than he and Chris, and he realized it was probably Belen, the proprietor of the building Chris had been staying in. Outside, voices rose and Tom shook free of her to listen at the window.

“You’re the one, then,” a man was saying. Through the curtains he could see a group of maybe six of them, their figures too blurry to make out in the dark. Chris’s hand was just inches from the glass, held open in midair, and Tom swallowed down his whimper, hating the glass separating them. What did they want with Chris? Calling him ‘the one’? What did they mean?

When Chris said nothing, the man at the front waved a hand forward and two of the other men took cautious steps in Chris’s direction. Still, Chris didn’t move, eyes trained on the group of them.

“Your massacre won you a bounty on your head. Almost forty grand. We’ll keep you in the jail until the nearest Deputy can arrive. Split it ‘mongst ourselves.”

“A bounty?” Tom whispered, nose pressed to the lace. _Massacre?_ Belen was tugging on his elbow, whispering to him in Spanish.

“We know you live here. Ain’t nowhere you can go now. Come with us nice and quiet and we won’t make the life of your Mexican lady friend a living hell.”

Chris shifted his head a fraction of an inch, and Tom stared at the dark outline of his face, the long stretch of thick lashes. Two of the men were closing the distance between them, reaching slowly for each of his arms. For as afraid as they seemed of him, Tom expected Chris to kill them with a single blink of his eyes, but he allowed the men to grab his arms and twist them up behind his back. Their leader kept his gun trained on Chris, while Chris’s own gun was forcibly removed from its holster and tossed to the ground, too dangerous for him to be near. Without a fuss, Chris was led around the side of the building and out of sight, Tom following him with his eyes as much as the windowpane would allow.

“Where are they taking him?” he asked, turning to Belen, but the woman was striking up a match, the flame illuminating her wrinkled face before the end of her cigarette glowed red and the flame snuffed out. “He just let them take him!”

“He protect you,” she said in her low, raspy voice. “You like wife.”

Now that his eyes were adjusting, he could make out they were in some kind of kitchen, the outline of a cold stove and shuttered cabinets rising to the side, a small wooden table up against the corner, a whittling knife on its scarred surface. The last image of Chris being hauled away lit brightly in his mind and he hugged his arms over his chest, despair crashing over him. Just as they were nearly free to live together, more deadly men had come to ruin his dreams once more. How would he get word to Eve? How would he get Chris out of the jail? He walked up to Belen, the acrid scent of her cigarette smoke burning his eyes. “Where is the jail? Please, I need to find him.”

“You stay here. You like wife. Cannot go out there.”

“I will go out there. He’s mine and they think they can just take him!” Anger welled up in his chest and he tried to keep his voice down. “Can you take me to his room at least? Where he keeps his things?”

Her eyes squinted. “You rob him?”

“No! I—.” He swallowed, not sure he was ready to voice what he felt to anyone but the one he wanted most to hear it. “I just want something warmer to wear. To sleep where he sleeps.”

She nodded and then pinched his ribs quickly. He gasped in pain and jumped away. But she just smiled. “Too skinny. I make you something.”

He nodded, careful with his distance from her. Before he followed her from the kitchen, he opened the back door and peeked out cautiously. Not a soul in sight, the night nearly pitch, but glinting in the dirty like a star fallen low was Chris’s gun. He stepped out on dirty feet and stooped to pick it up. It was heavier than he thought, and much bigger than in his hands than was safe, but he cradled it carefully and retreated inside, bolting the door behind him. Belen showed him to a room midway down a corridor on the second floor, using a long skeleton key to unlock the door. Tom slipped inside, eyes wide on the small space his giant cowboy had been using to live in. Small bed, small window, small bowl with a low puddle of water at its base. How to seal in the sun?

Placing the gun on a short table with spindle legs, Tom caught sight of rumpled cloth satchels pushed under the bed. Dropping to his knees he loosened the drawstring of the first one and peered inside. Chris had packed his belongings, folded trousers and soft, worn shirts, a jacket of softened cow hide. But deeper down were more garments, smaller and newer, clothes he instinctively knew were for him. Smiling, he set that bag aside and opened the next one, gasping at its contents, eyes widening at the stray bullets and sheathed knives gathered there, not to mention the snub-nosed shotgun he was afraid to touch. The scarred and dull metal reminded him of what the men had accused Chris of, a massacre. Had he really killed so many people as to warrant a bounty? But Chris surely couldn’t have done that. He had been nothing but gentle with Tom, voice low and calm, his hands never once hurting him. And yet, Chris’s silence under the weight of such an accusation could only mean affirmation, and it made Tom wonder what had truly happened before Chris rode into town.

The third satchel held food and water, ointment and sun salve, bandages and a spare blanket. Tom took his own small bag of belongings and included it in with Chris’s clothing, grateful that Chris was more prepared than he could ever be, considering his options. When he turned to look, he saw that Belen was gone and the door was closed. Shuffling up on the bed, he sat cross legged and hugged the thin pillow to his chest. Chris had said he was bunking by the stables. If Bullet was nearby, Tom might be able to break into the jail with the help of the animal’s brute strength. And with nearly no moon, his way would be cloaked in darkness. All he would need was an abundance of fearlessness.

His doubts about Chris were flimsy at best, wanting to trust in his heart what he knew of the man versus what these strange men had said about him. Ever since losing his parents in the deep desert, Tom had had no one but Eve, and she was as chained to the Madame as Tom had been. Chris was the only other person, and a man of all things, that made Tom feel that special kind of spark that reminded him of home, of safety and love, of a bridge out of all this darkness. If Tom had learned anything living in this town with these people, it was to trust his gut, that tug behind his navel that told him when something was right or wrong. And his interactions with Chris, even at the beginning when fear and suspicion clouded most of his judgment, had always felt different – _good_ – compared to other men.

If anything, he would wait to hear what Chris had to say about it. He wouldn’t be able to share his side locked up in the jail and Tom cowering in his room. Right now Belen was probably downstairs cooking him food, which based on his growling stomach, he would regret foregoing. But he needed to act now, or else lose his courage. Pulling free the first satchel, he searched until he found trousers that would more or less fit him. He slipped his lace dress off over his head and let it fall into the open satchel, not quite ready to part with it just yet. The trousers were loose at the waist, but Tom had lost weight while under the Madame’s roof, maybe they would fit him in a few months’ time. Lastly, he removed a dark blue shirt of Chris’s, soft cotton and thin pearl buttons, sleeves long to protect from the sun. The cotton was form-fitting, most likely used as an undershirt, but still too big on him regardless.

Tucked under the mattress frame were a pair of smaller sized boots, scuffed and spotted with use, and Tom half-wondered if Chris might have stolen them off of someone. Didn’t matter now, he thought, yanking them on and scrunching his nose at the slightly tight fight. They would loosen as he wore them.

There were voices in several of the other rooms along the corridor, and Tom kept his footsteps light as he crept to the stairwell so as not to rouse anyone’s attention. Snug against the base of his spine was Chris’s gun, a cold weight, unfamiliar but comforting. He wouldn’t know how to use it if the time ever came, but he hoped the sight of it would be enough to discourage any others he might encounter. The scent of food wafted up to meet him, making his stomach growl once more. Picking his way down the stairwell, he hesitated as his foot sank low on the last creaking step.

Breath caught, he listened for any sounds indicating Belen had heard the traitorous noise, but her soft humming continued on the other side of the kitchen door. Taking a deep breath, he tiptoed to the front door and eased it open, slipping out into the dark. Up the street he could see the roof’s edge of the Raven, enough to set his heart pounding in renewed panic. It was on this very patch of dirt that the Madame’s men had found him in the dead of night, stealing him back. It was impossible to have known that Chris had been only a short distance away, had even heard his short scream, had found his sad excuse of an escape satchel.

To think, he might have been safe by now, had they only just known each other sooner.

Tom snapped to, steeling himself and heading in the opposite direction. It was no use to anyone thinking of such things. He was free now, and he only had to remain free until he could locate Chris. And then they would be free together. That was a thought he was willing to think again and again, to sustain himself.

Several windows in the buildings along the street were lit, throwing squares of yellow he could follow, sticking to the shadows as he kept an eye out for anyone. He heard voices on the far side, some muted laughter, and even warbled singing from high above where he could not see. But the scent of animals led him along, spotting the metal rails of the stables after another minute. Chris had said that Bullet was a beast, probably in size and manner, which meant he might be kept apart from the other horses. There were fewer lights this far from the center of town, but he managed to climb the rail and hurried down the aisle without tripping in the porous dark. Most of the horses were lying on their sides, curled up in sleep, but some were on their feet nickering in curiosity as he fled by.

“Bullet,” he whispered, not wanting to raise his voice. “ _Bullet_.”

A deeper snort came from the end of the aisle, the stable kept angled into the corner, door faced away from the other horses. Slowing, Tom had the inherent sense that the animal inside the private enclosure was the biggest he would ever see, Chris’s comments about the horse whispering through his mind.

_He’s a mountain, and everything else is but stones under his hooves._

“Please don’t crush me,” he said under his breath and then stepped before the barred doorway of the stable.

It was dark inside, no small windows to let in light as the other animals had. This was a space for the most difficult beasts, no glimpses of the outside to tempt a temper outburst. And judging by the behemoth outline of the horse inside, Tom seriously doubted the small four walls could hold the animal if he really wanted out.

“H-hello, Bullet,” he gasped, eyes drawn low to the thud of giant hooves on packed dirt. “I’m Tom. I know Chris.”

Another deep snort, the wet flash of a blinking eye.

Glancing back up the aisle, Tom saw the heads of several horses peering out of their enclosures at him, motionless. Reaching for the metal clasp, he eased the gate open, surprised when it didn’t creak in protest. First one step, and then two, he walked into the horse’s space, its heat and musky scent rising to engulf him.

“Oh….gracious,” he moaned, backing into the corner and grasping one of the cold iron bars. He felt as small as a mouse, the horse taking two heavy steps and turning to face him head-on. Heart hammering in his throat, he craned his head back and held very still, the horse’s breath washing over his face as it leaned close and prepared to bite his face off.

Instead, the soft velvet of Bullet’s nose sniffed at Tom’s hairline, digging through his curls and dragging across his face to huff loudly at his ear. Tom jumped, body taut with tension, imagining sharp teeth were about to scrape into his skin and chew to his brain. But Bullet angled lower and sniffed at the collar of his shirt, rooting around the front pockets as if Tom might have a treat there for him.

He sighed out a shaky, terrified breath, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

“Do I smell like him?” he said quietly, lifting his hand and carefully stroking the horse’s long mane. He let the horse breathe on him a bit more, better to let his eyes adjust and take stock of what he had to work with. Surprisingly, Bullet was already saddled, smelling of oiled leather, scuffed and worn smooth. “We have to go get him. He’s locked away and you’re going to help me break him free. Yes?”

The horse nudged his head and Tom laughed low, skimming his fingers over the saddle’s pommel, wondering if he dared attempt to mount him. The only way out was through, he figured, and very slowly inched his foot up to the high stirrup – higher than any horse he remembered ever riding, leg muscles stretched as he strained to reach. If the horse stiffened slightly, head lifting in muted surprise perhaps, Tom ignored it and swallowed back his rising scream before hitching himself up into the saddle. Frozen, ears cocked back in a definitive show of mild contempt, Bullet stood stock still as Tom settled himself into the saddle, winded even from that short burst of movement. Locked away in the Madame’s establishment had weakened his lungs. He would need to learn how to breathe properly again.

“It’s alright now,” he said, still breathless, fighting back a short spike of panic at being so high aloft, his own equestrian experiences murky and distant memories from another life. “I won’t hurt you. Will you take me to him?” He gave the soft underbelly of the horse a gentle prodding, but it wasn’t until Bullet cast him a short side glance did he realize that had the horse willed it, he’d be a broken heap on the ground right now. “I know,” he whispered. “And thank you for not killing me.”

Very slowly, the horse maneuvered itself in the small space and pushed the gate fully open, stepping out and gaining a quick trot down the aisle. The other horses let out panicked nickering as Bullet sped past them, shifting restlessly in their stalls, eyes rolling wildly. Tom hoped they wouldn’t attract the attention of the stable master, but his worry was quickly replaced by something bigger and more daunting. Bullet was speeding faster and faster down the aisle and toward the far fence adjacent to the town’s outlying streets.

“Bullet!” Tom gasped, heart tripping several beats. He tightened his hold on the reins, but Bullet shook his head free, an angry snort gusting from his wide nostrils. The reins snapped in the air, twirling violently, and Tom bent forward to grip the horse’s black mane, careful with the bucking neck, hard muscle that would easily break his nose if he got too close. He knew what the horse’s intentions were the closer they got to the fence without slowing. Hunkering down, he closed his eyes at the last second and felt his stomach flip as the horse launched over the gate. They were airborne for a solid four seconds before landing hard on the other side. Skidding, the horse gathered its feet under him and huffed excitedly, massive hooves kicking at the dirt, sidestepping in a circle. Grabbing the reins again, Tom sighed out a tremulous breath, eyes wide on the area around them. All was dark and motionless. Perhaps their escape had gone unnoticed after all.

“Let’s go!” he whispered and Bullet shot forward again. As far as where the jail was located, Tom only had a vague idea, but Bullet seemed to be operating on some inner tracking mechanism, galloping confidently forward to wherever his master was being held. Tom had never seen an animal as strong or big as Bullet, and it seemed fitting that the horse held its most unyielding devotion to Chris, a man of the same qualities, just as fiercely and dangerously beautiful. They complimented each other quite well, an intimidating pair. How Tom would fit in with their daring company was something he was slowly beginning to accept as uncanny serendipity, a chance at adventure and love – and safety, above all – with the unlikeliest of them all.

By the time Bullet turned a quick corner, muscle memory was only barely returning to Tom’s legs. Heels down, back straight, hips loose, he was beginning to flow well with Bullet’s movements when the horse slowed to a stop, ears flat as he faced them toward a low-topped building, aluminum sheets nailed across the roof, a shuttered porch angling the entrance to a single middle doorway.

It was deserted, he thought, curiously unmanned. Until the burning eye of a cigarette end lit brightly in the dark, and his courage took a flagging dip.

**Chris:**

He lay on the dirt floor of this shit excuse for a jailhouse this town had, wrists shackled at the small of his back to a solid stone spike buried deep beneath him. The night was steadily turning over, cold seeping up from the hard ground and into his shoulders, sore and knotted from being twisted back. But his blood was hot with fury, eyes slit in calculated thought.

Tension had escalated too quickly, his capture sooner than he’d anticipated. Laying low hadn’t been enough. At the first sign of unrest, Chris would have taken to the desert with Bullet and a well-stocked satchel, running from this exact kind of trouble. But he couldn’t leave without the boy, not now after having known him. He didn’t want these men who’d accosted him to know of Tom. Knowing of Belen was bad enough, as his friend she’d done right by him and he wouldn’t abide by her ruin on his watch. But Tom. That sweet boy. They wouldn’t touch him. They wouldn’t know of him at all. Chris had every intention of breaking himself out here, he was just waiting for the last of the men to head home. They’d stood around outside congratulating each other rather heartily, their voices flowing in through the high window. But the chill drove off all but one, stepping around the perimeter of the shack, his spurs the only indication he was still around. That and the cigarette smoke.

Chris had tried squeezing his wrists out of the shackles, cutting himself on one hand, bruising the other. It was pitch black inside, the wispy moon doing nothing to illuminate his surroundings. At one point something crawled over his forearm, something long with tiny legs – a centipede. Shuffling to his feet, jaw gritted to hold back his shout, he stamped on the ground until he heard the telltale crunch of the vermin’s squirming body, chills racing up his back as ghost vibrations of the horrid thing whispered over him still. He could only hope there weren’t any rattlers curled up in here with him, waiting to strike at him.

Goddamn busybodies thinking they could stick their noses where they don’t belong. He was stuck in here while Tom waited back at the boardinghouse, scared and nervous, his taste of freedom marred by this petty inconvenience. What Chris was wanted for wasn’t petty – that he knew. He’d killed those men at Cold Creek to save his friend’s life. He’d do it again. To save himself. To save Tom. Self-preservation and love did that to a man.

Love.

He hung his head in that heavy dark and grinned at the floor. That slim turtledove had snared him right, and Chris had let himself be taken. Damned if he had. It wouldn’t make a lick of difference if he didn’t free himself from this cage before the night’s end. If he managed to—

“That’s far enough,” a deep voice called from the outside of the four walls, and Chris froze. It was the voice of the one of the men who’d caught him, the one who remained. But who was he talking to?

“I’m here to free him,” another voice said, one he would recognize among a thousand. Low and sweetly soft, Tom’s words were rounded with a warble of fear, but he kept it strong enough to carry across the way and between the cracks of the walls imprisoning Chris.

The man outside chuckled. “You’ll not be taking him any—.” But he broke off sharply and the silence left behind was pocked with the crack of fast-moving hooves on dirt, the rumble like claps of thunder. Chris straightened, arms straining. Was that—?

An eternity of a second passed before the deafening ricochet of a gunshot sounded and Chris scrambled as close to the wall as possible, his wrists hitched high behind him, metal biting into his flesh. His heart tripped to a dreaded halt.

“Tom!”

Something heavy fell to the ground just outside the wall before him, a horse snorting and stamping and sounding entirely too much like Bullet – but that couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. Boot tips gouging deep tracks into the dirt, knees bent, Chris strained at the chain spiked deep, grunting, jaw clenched, praying that Tom was unhurt. Whether anyone would investigate the gunshot was hard to say, as most folks kept indoors come dark, but the man’s friends might come looking. These damn shackles were tearing into his wrist bones, blood dripping to the sand. But he couldn’t pull hard enough, couldn’t free himself soon enough to check on the boy.

There was a sudden clattering on the wooden planks outside, and then the door was blown open. Shuffling back, Chris stared at the hellfire vision of Bullet standing on the rickety porch, hooves clacking as he backed down the steps and huffed a cloud of steam into the cool night air. Peering as far around the corner as he could, Chris whispered, “Tom?”

All was motionless for several eternal moments, but then he heard a quiet shuffling, a shadow unfolding and lengthening in his view. Tom limped into the doorway, dressed as a makeshift boy in the clothes Chris had stored away for him, trousers big at the waist, cinched with a belt, Chris’s own shirt tucked in messily, blood soaking the material black along one arm.

“No.” He tried rising to his feet, but the chain yanked him back again. “No, no, babe, no. Goddammit, Tom.”

Tom’s face was pale but beaming, his free hand clutching the wound on his arm. “I did it!” he whispered, and hurried toward Chris. He collapsed on his knees before him, both tucking their heads against each other, Chris breathing at his neck, a sob swelling in his throat.

“Babe. Christ, you didn’t have to do that.”

“Oh, hush. Yes I did. They took you from me, those bastards!”

Chris actually smiled, relief running through him. But the blood spilling sluggishly down Tom’s arm sobered him fast. “He shot you.”

Tom glanced down with a wince, fingers shaking. “Skimmed. It’s not deep. I honestly don’t think I’m feeling it right. Not really.”

“You will soon. And we need to be gone when you do.” Chris motioned his chin to Tom’s foot. “You’re limping?”

“When I fell off Bullet. Hurt my ankle. Twisted it, I think.”

“Okay, babe. Is the man dead?”

“Yes. Bullet trampled him. He’s in a piled mess outside.”

“Alright. He’ll have some keys on him. Keys that will open these shackles. Go on and—.”

But Tom was already thrusting his good arm forward, a rusted key glinting silver in his bloody palm. Cradling his wounded arm against his chest, he knelt behind Chris and fumbled with the key in slippery fingers until he was able to turn the lock. The shackles fell free and Chris pivoted on a knee to face him. Checking his face quickly, he examined his bicep and found Tom’s words to be true. It was a superficial wound, cotton and a top layer of skin torn open. Still, he reached for the tail of Tom’s shirt and tore a wide piece of it clean off, Tom’s small gasp making him smile, albeit a small one.

“Your wrists,” Tom whispered, touching a finger to the mottled and abused joints.

Chris shrugged. “Nothing that won’t heal. Are you ready?”

Tom nodded. “Wait. Your gun.” He pulled the weapon out from under his shirt and Chris took it gratefully, concealing it in the band of his own trousers.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and ducked his head to kiss him, full and well and deep. Gasping through his nose, Tom remained frozen for a quick moment before crushing himself against Chris in a way that revealed a trust and affection that hadn’t been there at the beginning of their acquaintance. That it had bloomed so easily now in this dark shed of dirt and wormed wood, both bleeding and shaking with fatigue and nerves, made Chris’s confidence build a hundredfold, sure in the knowledge that what they were doing was right.

Wrapping an arm around Tom’s waist, Chris helped him up and guided him outside. He wanted to take a look at Tom’s ankle, but it was best if he didn’t remove the boot just yet so that the swelling wouldn’t worsen.

Bullet was standing out on the street, long neck turned behind him, ears flat.

“Hey, good lookin’,” Chris said and Bullet turned his head. Tom leaned away a little uneasily, as if he thought Bullet might bite at him or Chris, but Bullet only stuck his tongue out and licked a stripe over Chris’s eyebrows.

“I’m surprised he let me on him,” Tom admitted in a rushed whisper. “I thought he was going to kill me for a second there back at the stables.” Chris gave a soft laugh.

“He likes women, the rowdy thing. And you are as like a woman as a man can be, my sweet dove.”

Tom smiled, his face flushing prettily in the dark. “Plus I think I smell like you.”

Nuzzling his hairline, Chris murmured, “I like that you do.”

Chris gave him a boost into the saddle and then took the reins to lead Bullet away. No one apprehended them in the two minutes it took them to arrive at Belen’s building, but Chris kept his ears sharpened for any sound of approach, glad to have his gun back just in case. He hustled Bullet into the alley out back, and then told Tom to stay put. Belen was in the kitchen, stuffing bags with food still warm from the pan.

“He sneak out. Your wife. Just like you. Perfect for you.”

Chris grinned and gave her a hard peck on the temple, stealing a tortilla from the stove. The stairs creaked as he rushed up to his room, but he couldn’t afford to be cautious, chewing the warm flour tortilla in pieces that unspooled like a cloud on his tongue. The small space he’d been bunking in still smelled faintly of Tom’s perfume, the ghost of his presence just as soothing as the thought of him out on the horse waiting for him. Pulling the duffel bags from under the bed, he strapped on another gun belt and loaded the shotgun. Hauling everything down again, he found Belen outside with Tom, two bags in her hands. They were talking quietly, but he missed the last of their conversation.

“Everything okay?”

Tom smiled. “Yes, love. Belen was telling me that you will protect me from anything, and that I should pinch your ear if you get too rough with me.”

Belen nodded seriously, her black eyes squinted in that scrutinizing way of hers. “I be back. Get water for you.” She walked into the kitchen through the small side door, her slippered feet glowing like white moths. Chris inched closer to Tom, a hand on his knee.

“We’ll leave in a minute, sweetheart. How’s your ankle? Let me see.”

He was reaching to remove Tom’s boot when, out of the corner of his eye he caught Bullet’s ears twitch, hooves shifting nervously before Tom jerked hard on the saddle, and then disappeared over the other side.

“Tom?”

Removing his gun and slapping Bullet’s rump in one quick move, the horse skittered out of the way and left the view open of the far side of the clearing. Tripping to his feet, wincing at the twist in his ankle, was Tom with a blade to his throat, eyes wide, chin arched high to best avoid the sharp bite of the knife. Behind him, hair in wild curls down her back, was the Madame. She wore a simple white shift, a sleeping gown Chris saw, with bare feet and eyes wide with paranoia, or insanity. She must have snuck into the clearing through the bushes lining the back end of Belen’s property, great big shrubs so green and thick, they were practically black at night. Cursing, Chris leveled the gun steadily between her eyes, thinking of lightning strikes.

“You, then,” she said, her deep voice cut with anger. One palm fisted in Tom’s shirt, the other trembling at his neck, Chris was honestly not surprised she had the strength to pull him down from the saddle. There was a rage in her that she kept tightly coiled and manicured behind her fancy east coast fashions and her tamed shark smile, but pushed to her limit and she was a ferocity he’d never seen in a woman, or as often in men. “It was you all the time. Mr. Billiards Player.” She snarled the nickname, digging the knife deeper into the soft skin of Tom’s neck. His pained gasp was like a spike of ice in Chris’s chest, and his finger inched over the trigger, aimed directly at the foul woman’s brow.

“Let the boy go.”

“No!” She hauled Tom closer, and a bead of blood trickled thickly down the hollow of his throat and into the collar of his shirt. The gun in Chris’s hand vibrated, his fury funneling into the tight grip of his palm. “This boy is mine. I saved him and he owes everything to me.”

Teeth gritted, Chris slid a boot an inch closer to them. “He’s not like some goddamn cat you took in off the street. He’s a person and he doesn’t belong to you.”

“But he belongs to you?” She sneered easily, a mad gleam to her eyes. “What a happy coincidence that it should work out that way.”

“I’m not trying to keep him locked up in a bedroom, chained to a bed to service every cowboy that bustles through this town.”

“You’re not taking him. And you’ll pay for the lives of the men you killed. _My_ men.”

Chris was wondering where her remaining guns were, and why she was out here on her own as opposed to sending her lackeys after Tom for her. She seemed frayed enough that she might just answer him if he asked, so he did.

She scoffed. “One fell down the back staircase just this morning. A deed I don’t entirely believe was accidental, and something I suspect my spiteful daughter was behind. With that one’s broken neck, the other took off across the sands toward the sierras and now there’s no one.”

With tears flooding his eyes, it didn’t appear as if Tom was listening to the conversation, instead he was stretched high on his tiptoes to avoid the blade’s sharp edge. In the corner, Bullet strode in quick, agitated circles, long tale flicking as he watched them. The Madame was a tall woman, imposing at her most put-together state. But her panic and rage only reduced her to a rabid specter in white, face pale, teeth clenched, eyes shifting to Chris and beyond him as if seeing things that were really not there. Rather than honing her focus, the Madame’s anger and frustration and loss of control had pinpricked her attention to something dangerous and dark, the threat of death an easy thing.

What was she willing to lose? Her lifestyle? Her ownership of the girls and their bodies for her personal gain? The role she’d carved out for herself in this harsh world of men through the pitting of female imprisonment and abuse? And she would use Tom as her crutch? Her shield? Her anchor to ensure that nothing changed?

Shifting his gun a fraction of an inch to the right, Chris decided she wasn’t about to have her way anymore, not at the price of another’s suffering, especially Tom’s.

“You won’t do it,” she said quietly, confident in her knowledge of what Chris would and wouldn’t risk. “Not with him here—.”

He gave the trigger a gentle squeeze and felt the gun erupt with its booming firepower. The Madame’s head snapped back in much the same way the head of her gunman had in the alleyway behind her establishment, the first life he took in this town. It was too dark to see the blood spray, or the gaping wound that would be the back of her skull, or the chunks of brain that he knew were scattered on the ground behind her, like pink pebbles in the dirt. There was the stilted buckling of her legs and the heavy collapse of her body, Tom dragged to the ground with her. His cry was short and pained, the knife loosely drawn over the thin ridge of his clavicle as her hand dragged crookedly to the ground, another wound to heal.

Bullet neighed nervously, snorting and dancing closer just as Chris hurried forward. There was a mist of red splattered on one side of his face, tears streaking through and turning the blood pink. He was struggling to rise from beneath the Madame’s weight, tangled with her legs and long cotton shift, sobbing brokenly in his distress. Chris skidded to his knees beside him and threw the Madame’s limp arm off of Tom, who launched himself against Chris, his face pressed to his chest, trembling.

“You’re safe. You’re okay. Oh, my sweetheart, you’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Tom’s voice was blurry with tears, his hands twisted in Chris’s shirt, clawing closer. A long shadow fell over them and Chris startled to the side, but it was only Belen, brown eyes narrowed on the Madame’s body.

“You kill?”

Heart pounding hard, Chris nodded, holding the boy tightly in his arms.

“She hurt wife?”

He nodded again.

With a curious hum, she bent forward slightly and spit on the Madame’s body. Chris nodded a final time and collapsed backward onto the hard dirt, Tom cradled in his lap. Knees creaking, Belen knelt beside them and cooed something in Spanish.

“ _Dejame ver_ ,” she whispered, and gently tugged Tom’s arm down from his chest, curled in on himself protectively. His neck was soaked with blood, shirt dark with it, but he let her check the wound. Forehead pressed to Chris’s throat, Tom was slick with sweat, fingers shaking from his cold brush with death. Chris’s own limbs were drenched in ice water, the realization of how close he’d come to almost losing Tom, yet again, too much for his heart to bear. He felt like weeping, he felt like screaming at the moon, he felt like clawing his way deep into the earth and living with Tom there, safe and forgotten, just the two of them, but he swallowed back the lump in his throat and blinked away his tears, cupping Tom’s face with a palm.

Tom’s eyes flitted up to meet him, wide and shining with tears. His lashes, clumped together and moist, were like spikes. He whispered his name and Chris’s heart swelled painfully, this boy so precious to him, so loved.

“I do,” he whispered hotly, “I love you. No one will hurt you. I fucking promise it. Not while I live.”

Tom’s face collapsed in renewed tears and he reached up to embrace Chris fully, their bodies clenched tightly. Belen patted his shoulder and whispered again in Spanish, her words cracked with age and wisdom, and he knew that whatever she was saying would be just what they – and Tom – needed to hear. He took her elbow gratefully, and she nodded with a wrinkled smile, the beautiful old crone.

Together they helped Tom limp inside the building, setting him on a chair in the kitchen. Belen didn’t have ice but she wrapped Tom’s bare ankle in a tight cloth, the slender joint swollen and purpling darkly. Chris worked to clean the cut on his clavicle, wiping it down and drizzling a spot of liquor on it so that it wouldn’t fester. Tom screamed into a dishtowel, but remained upright. Chris ran outside to Bullet and pulled out the first garment he found in one of the duffel bags. He didn’t realize it was the dress Tom had been wearing when they’d made their escape from the Madame’s brothel until he shook it open. Tom waved away his concern, saying it was okay. They removed his blood- and liquor-stained shirt and pulled on the dress. It fell to his ankles in wispy, gossamer waves, but he cinched it at his waist with a determined tug and made to stand.

“Easy, babe,” he said, taking Tom’s waist as he tottered like a woman heavily pregnant, just the thought tightening Chris’s groin.

“We have to leave,” Tom whispered. “She’s dead and they’ll soon discover you’re not at the jail.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“I don’t care. I’ll be with you. I have nothing to fear.”

His confidence was heartwarming, and contagious. “Fine. I’ll check Bullet for anything missing, and then we’re gone.”

They cleaned and bandaged Tom’s bullet wound and the cut on his chest, Tom looking paler by the minute. Once finished, Belen took Tom’s other side and they hobbled back outside. The air was dropping in temperature, turning colder by the hour. Chris draped a jacket over Tom’s shoulders and then lifted him onto the back of the horse. Their supplies were as complete as they could make them, extra clothing, water and food, weapons and a shovel, should they need them. It was lucky Bullet was so large; the extra weight would burden a smaller horse.

Chris turned to Belen. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You give him nice house. With garden. Don’t leave him with nothing and no one.”

Chris had a suspicion she spoke from personal experience, and nodded. “I will. We’ll write you. Let you know we’re safe.”

She smiles. “Good. I wait for letters.” Nodding at the Madame’s body, she shrugged indifferently. “I get rid of her. I know how.”

He gave her a hug and held it tight, pleased when she finally lifted her arms and returned the embrace. Her eyes were misty when they pulled apart. “Go,” she said, voice hoarse. Chris lifted a foot and hoisted himself into the saddle, Tom scooting up behind him. Belen reached up and squeezed Tom’s hand. “So pretty. You live many years.”

Tom smiled and ducked his head. “Thank you, Belen. I’ll miss you.”

She waved a hand easily. “I live in moon. Look there and I be bright for you.”

Tears filled Tom’s eyes again, and he nodded, throat closed to any remaining words. Wrapping himself close to Chris, he waved once more at her as Chris clucked his tongue. Bullet turned a tight circle and clattered off down the alley. Tom watched her as they rode away, a small figure in the murky light of a young moon, her long gray braid swaying in the breeze.

Chris spurred Bullet into a fast clip, the horse pounding the earth as if having yearned for a stretch of hard land beneath his hooves. Their route takes them west by night, sticking to the snaking veins of dry rivers and creek beds. Tom clings to him but moves well with the horse, making Chris think he’d been on horseback before, maybe when he still lived back east, when he was happy.

I’ll make him happy yet, he thought, for the rest of my days. It would be his sole reason to live.

After a few of hours, Tom whispered that his ankle was throbbing too much and Chris thought it a good time to camp down for the night. He found a copse of gnarled mesquite trees by a short cliff outcropping, as good a hideaway as they would be able to find this late at night. He climbed off the horse and tied the reins to a low branch before reaching up to help Tom. Shivering from the cold, Tom was stiff, grimacing as he took hold of Chris’s shoulders to slowly slide from the back of the horse. He groaned in muted pain as he placed his weight on both legs, thighs sore, ankle swollen. Leaning him against the rock outcropping, Chris was quick with their bedrolls, searching the ground for a flat spot against the rock. He snapped a branch from the tree and swept it in wide arcs, hoping to scatter any critters from the area. The last thing he needed was a centipede or tarantula crawling over them. Bullet’s presence would keep all other wildlife away, except for the larger mountain cats, but those were rarely seen so low in the valley.

“Chris,” Tom whispered, swaying where he stood, his dress catching the cold breeze, the sewn-in beads clacking gently.

“Coming, babe,” he whispered back, overlapping the edges of their bedrolls and standing from his crouch. He hugged Tom under his arms, clasping him loosely to pull him over to their makeshift bed. “Okay, here we go. Easy now, love. Down, bend your knees.”

Tom complied easily, his legs like noodles as Chris lowered him to the ground. Squeezing his knees together, Tom whimpered and touched his inner thighs carefully, no doubt painfully tender. But he curled himself comfortably and looked to fall asleep almost immediately, arms folded under his head like a pillow. Chris tended to Bullet next, removing the saddle but leaving the under blanket on just in case they needed to make a quick escape. The horse moved away on his own, no doubt scenting out water. Chris let him go, knowing Bullet would return shortly. Kneeling beside Tom, he removed a salve from one of the satchels and hitched Tom’s leg up on his thigh, slowly removing the cloth from his foot. The skin was swollen and ridged with deep lines from the bandage, colored dark purple. He’d twisted it badly falling off of Bullet, but Chris was relieved to feel around the joint that nothing appeared to be broken. Stirring, Tom sat up and blinked his eyes blearily. His voice was rough and dry.

“Where are we?”

“Still too close to Silver Dam for comfort.”

“Will they look for us?”

Chris wasn’t sure. But with the Madame’s death soon to be revealed, one outlaw’s escape from town might not mean as much. Unless people believed he’d killed her, which he did and would never regret. But Tom didn’t need to be reminded of her. “Maybe.”

In the darkened shadows, Tom’s face was a pale orb, but Chris could feel his eyes on him. “Am I really with you? Have we survived this?”

Chris put his leg down gently and crawled over Tom, noses hovering an inch apart. “We survived. But we’re not through the worst yet.”

Tom’s hands slipped up over his ribs and curled around to press along his spine. Chris eased his weight lower, not fully resting on Tom, but eased with comfort regardless. He missed the boy’s warmth, wanted him in every possible way, yearned to hear his laugh and gasps of pleasure. They would indulge themselves with kisses yet.

Tom seemed content to simply be held by Chris, running his straight nose over the bump of Chris’s throat, sniffing him there and kissing the skin gently. Happy to let him explore, Chris cupped his head and held still until Tom shifted and stretched his foot with a grimace. They drank water and chewed on some peppered jerky, and Tom collapsed back with an exhausted huff, moaning as Chris massaged his leg from knee to toe, the salve wetting the skin comfortably.

“You’re alright, baby. You’re alright.”

Tom nodded sleepily. “I’m alright.”

Once Bullet had returned, snout wet from whatever creek he’d found, Chris tied his lead to a branch and settled down beside Tom. The wind gusted in short whistles beyond the outcropping, rustling the shrubs and keeping Chris’s teeth on edge. Wrapped in a shawl, Tom was shivering. He turned to Chris and pressed himself against him, and Chris held him close, rubbing his back for warmth, murmuring at his brow, tugging the scarf tighter around Tom’s head to guard him from the chill. They slept, Tom deeply and Chris fitfully, closing his eyes for short minutes before startling awake, shushing Tom’s murmurs, eyes sharp on the dark surroundings. Bullet had curled himself on the ground by the tree, a large breathing mound of heat and cracked open eyes. His presence gave Chris comfort that they wouldn’t be ambushed.

By the time the horizon was ringed with pale pink, he was anxious to leave. He left Tom bundled under the blanket while he saddled up Bullet and followed him to the creek he’d found. The horse drank deeply and Chris refilled the canteens, washing his face and rinsing his mouth. Tom was barely rousing when he returned, responding to Chris’s gentle kisses. Chris wrapped his foot in the bandage once more and then carried Tom to the creek, where Tom splashed his face and relieved himself in the brush, wincing as he hobbled on his one good leg. Chris tugged him close and he rested against him gratefully, lifting his arms and hugging him, sharing a soft kiss until Bullet nudged his shoulder impatiently and they parted with a little laugh. After a small breakfast of tortillas and cold eggs, they climbed onto Bullet and set off once more, the pace fast as they chased the sun.

It was late September, and the days wouldn’t be as burning as the middle of summer, but Tom kept his face buried against his back for most of the day anyway, his head scarf trailing in the wind behind them. When they stopped to rest, it was only to water the horse and stretch their legs. Tom would smile and touch Chris’s cheek, whispering, “Sun burned,” before kissing his stubbled face sweetly. Tom’s own cheeks were pink from the heat, his skin much more delicate than Chris’s own.

They rode for four days, resting most of the night, Chris’s fear of pursuit lessening with every mile he placed between them and Silver Dam. He was worried about Eve, and the future of the girls who had been working for the Madame; he was worried about Belen, even though he knew her to be perfectly capable of protecting herself. If any fire rained down on her because of his actions he would never forgive himself. He wondered what she had done with the body.


	11. Sandstorm and Home

**Chris:**

Their passage through the desert had gone smoothly up until the sand storm. Chris had felt the swing in the wind’s currents, strong gusts that kept pushing Bullet from his steady path. With one of Tom’s scarves wrapped around the bottom half of his face, Chris tried to peer into every direction but found only dust clouds, thicker by the minute. Bullet’s eyes were wide with panicked anger at the violent wind, slowing to a step and stomping at the ground, turning this way and that, but there was no escaping it. Grit and sand were piercing their eyes, grinding between their teeth, tumbling down their parched throats. He would need to stop them or risk falling into a ravine. He dismounted and stumbled up to a dry-barked mesquite, its flailing limbs covered with inch-long thorns. Pulling Tom down first, Chris removed the scarf from his own face and wrapped it over Bullet’s eyes before shouting at him to get down. The horse’s legs buckled immediately, curling up on his side as if to sleep. In the saddle bags, Chris found another scarf and tied it over his head, checking that Tom’s was as secure. Last was a blanket.

Sinking down beside Bullet, Chris guided Tom to the ground and pulled him into his lap, throwing the blanket over their heads. Bullet’s body exuded warmth, but they curled themselves close to the animal, blocked in by most of its bulk, arms wrapped tightly around each other, heads bent cheek to cheek. Chris could feel Tom’s labored breathing, the harsh puff of it on his neck, his hands clawing into his shirt as if the storm might carry him away. But Chris embraced him hard, wanting all of Tom’s fears banished, cradling him in a way Tom should have been cradled from the beginning of his experiences with men. The wind roared around them, and Tom clung to him sweetly, and Chris breathed his breaths and kissed his ear, and kissed his neck, and kissed him, because he could and they were free.

The storm abided after an hour, the wind’s quieting to soft breezes. Bullet’s rump was covered with sand like a large dune, his and Tom’s legs hidden even deeper. Throwing off the stifling blanket, Tom tore away their scarves and took Chris’s head in both hands, staring at him. His lashes and brows were dotted with sand, more raining from his growing curls, but he grinned and said, those words that swelled Chris’s heart to bursting, reaching for him to kiss.

Bullet found them another creek and they drank greedily. Tom sat on the bank and dipped his long legs in, pale stems that glowed brightly in the sun. He bathed and scrubbed the dust from every bit of skin he could reach, splashing water on his neck and behind his ears, soaking his hair and shaking it clean. Chris stood enraptured on the hill just behind him, drinking in every one of Tom’s movements, admiring the lovely curve of his neck, the widening length of his shoulders, all bone-wings and knobby joints, soft, so soft. Bullet nudged him for more oats, and Chris blinked stupidly, holding out his palm and clearing his throat.

They rode again, further across the desert lands, watching the landscape change from brittle brush to giant saguaros, loping mounds to sifting grasses, and finally the harder rocky terrain of ocean land.

They could smell the shift in the air on the fifth day, the wind scented with salt. Tom smiled at him over his shoulder, squeezing his waist excitedly. Bullet led them down the craggy face of the sea cliffs and to the beach itself, the surf coming up to lick at his giant hooves. He tossed his head and snorted, and Tom laughed prettily.

“Is this California?” he asked.

“It is,” Chris said. “Mostly uncharted territory. San Francisco is farther north. We’re by the southern waters.”

“It’s beautiful. So different from the ocean back east.” He pressed his cheek to Chris’s shoulder. “We will be happy here,” he said, contentment etching his words, eyes on the wide plane of water.

“Yes,” Chris said, Bullet tiptoeing in a soft circle in the sand. “We will.”

He started by renting them a room in one of the boardinghouses lining the main street of town further east. Once Tom was safely indoors with his leg propped up and his bandages changed, Chris stabled Bullet and went in search of any person selling or renting private lodging.

The man’s name was Horace. With a handlebar mustache and a gut that bulged over his belt buckle, he looked ever the gruff frontier businessman, but he was soft-spoken and reacted kindly to Chris’s explanation of his and Tom’s expectations for living quarters.

“I say nothing about a person’s lifestyle. You like your men, I like my women. I don’t force my beliefs, and I expect others to grant me the same courtesy. I sure despise proselytizing.”

“And I sure appreciate that,” Chris said seriously, pleased he didn’t have to fight someone so soon. His life with Tom wouldn’t be a point of contention, and if someone insisted on making it one, Chris was ready to defend it. Horace had several properties, but showed him only one, a two bedroom house down by the bay.

“Haven’t been able to rent it out because it’s so far from the center of town,” Horace admitted, giving the doorjamb a gentle kick. “Was about ready to sell it off, remove it from my listing. If you and your boy wish to avoid some of the more scandalized gossip around town, this might be the place. Or I can recommend you to a friend who has other properties.”

“I’ll take it,” Chris said, peering out the front window to where the surf crashed against the white sand, the stalks of the grass whistles swaying and singing a soothing tune. There were dunes that rose to the side of the house that obscured the structure from immediate view of the valley to the west, which is probably why Chris hadn’t seen the house when they’d first arrived. That and he was tired as all hell. He’d hardly slept in the time it took to escape Silver Dam, and he was ready for privacy and quiet. This little house just might do it.

It had no furnishings, but Chris had enough money to procure the bare necessities – like a bed, some receiving couches, and a table with a set of four chairs – to make the beginning of their stay comfortable. Tom became enamored with it, giving a little happy exclamation at the charming house, and its location.

“Right by the sea!” he smiled, limping from room to room and returning to Chris in the kitchen. “I love it. Is it really ours?”

“I’m renting it for now. But as soon as I start to save up more money I’ll talk to Horace about buying it off him. We’ll be good, clean tenants. I’m sure he won’t put up a fuss. He seems reasonable enough.”

Tom kept busy decorating their house, putting up drapes of white and blue flowers, arranging their pantry and fixing their bed with fresh sheets. Chris kept to town the first couple of days, looking for employment. His background in criminal activity and murder wouldn’t draw him any good favors, except with the numerous gangs he took note of around the butcher’s end. He ended up inquiring at the stables where he had kept Bullet the first few nights. The man, Nicholas, agreed that he’d observe Chris as a horse handler for a day or two, and would consider a proposition for employment by the end of the week. Chris shook on it, knowing he would win the man over, his horsemanship skills second to none.

Returning to Tom at their home, he would stop at the crest of the hill and watch him move about the fenced yard out back, putting up a line of rope for clothes and laundry, talking to Bullet in a nonstop sentence, the horse following him from corner to corner, out to the front yard, or he waited for Tom by the door should Tom need to go inside for a moment. If Chris wasn’t around to protect Tom, he knew Bullet would.

Settling into their home, they spoke of themselves, of Tom’s life on the east coast, of Chris’s past. He told Tom his criminal history, the many deaths he was responsible for, what he did in order to save his friend.

“It weighs heavy on you,” Tom said quietly. “But know that I don’t judge you for your past. It is the man you are now, how you treat me, how we are together, in love and respect and kindness, that matters to me.”

At night, Chris did nothing more than hold Tom, who seemed as exhausted as Chris felt, the journey through the desert, recovering from his multiple injuries, and settling into their new home draining him of any extra energy. The fear and anxiety Tom had shown the first day they met under the Madame’s roof was nearly gone, only showing itself in the late, late hours when the room was dark and Tom would wake from his dreams with a panicked gasp, jumping out of Chris’s arms and whimpering as he scooted away, fearful that Chris was another man, a hurtful man, who would force himself on him.

But Chris would slowly bring him round, taking his wrists gently, lowering his voice and speaking to him quietly, reminding him of who he was and where they were. Tom’s tearful apologies would break the silence of their house by the sea, muted pleas for patience, for forgiveness. But there was nothing to forgive. Chris would wait until the end of time for Tom to be ready. It was after moments like these that their kisses and affections turned the most passionate, Tom clawing himself as close to Chris as possible, their kisses smacking loudly in the dark, his legs winding around Chris until they moved and burned long enough to come together on a joined tidal wave of release.

Those beautiful minutes, when Tom’s skin was flushed with heat and his heart beat a tattoo against Chris’s chest, when his smiles were breathy and his fingers lax in his hair, Chris would memorize the scent and feel of him, committing it to a place in his heart that reminded him of home.

Still, Chris kept his gun belt hanging from the corner post of their headboard, other weapons scattered throughout the house should he need them at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t of the trusting nature, and having his weapons nearby eased some of his trepidation.

The night it happened, Tom was all shy smiles. They had just sent off letters to Eve and Belen, hoping the post made it to Silver Dam under their false names. Based on the content of the letters, both women would know who they were from. They’d eaten a simple dinner of roasted fish and rice, with a serving of vegetables Tom chopped and cooked himself. Outside, Bullet was pacing the yard calmly, munching at the apple cores Tom always left him at sunset. The lamp was lit low, golden light washing the lower half of the room like pollen in the air.

Chris had had a successful few weeks working for Nicholas at the stables, in charge of the horses and their upkeep, earning a respectable dollar. He always came home smelling of hay and oats, at which Bullet would snort derisively and give Tom a lick on the cheek for.

“He’s just jealous,” Tom would say, laughing, rubbing Bullet’s velvet nose. Chris would grab the horse’s neck in an affectionate hold and plant a kiss on the broad cheek, knowing Bullet would never bite or kick him for his necessary decision to work around other animals.

“It’s for those oats you love so much,” Chris would call over his shoulder as he headed inside for a bath.

Both clean and fresh for bed, Tom adjusted his dressing gown – a simple cotton sheath that tempted Chris with the gossamer exposure of his long body – and knelt beside Chris on the bed. Chris, lying back on the pillows, put down the newspaper he was reading and settled a hand on Tom’s hip.

They stared at each other a moment, Tom trying his best not to fidget.

“Chris,” he said, a whisper.

Chris rubbed his hipbone. “Yes, love.”

“I’m…” He paused, and blinked down at his lap. “Will - ?” But rather than finish his sentence, his words tangled somewhere on his tongue, he lifted a leg and straddled Chris’s tummy, planting both hands on each of Chris’s nipples, pressing down softly.

Chris’s heart almost jumped out of his ribcage, his eyes widening. “Babe - .”

“I want to,” Tom said quickly. He shifted his hips forward, and Chris could feel the soft bulge of Tom’s balls against his abdomen. “I’ve been ready, I _am_ ready, and now I’m letting you know. Because I truly feel like you are my husband, and I love you. And I would like to try feeling what I’m curious about with you. And no one else.”

Ever since finding Tom and discovering what he’d been forced to do with other men, Chris had been battling a kind of rage and jealousy he’d never experienced before, moments when thoughts of Tom with another man became so disturbing he actively avoided those mental pathways lest he crack something in two with his bare hands. It was part of why he avoided the Sapphire Raven in the days after they’d truly committed to their escape plan, both unable to ignore their feelings for each other. Disgusted by the involuntary prostitution into which Tom was forced was only made worse by the thought of the other men who were allowed to touch him, be with him, _feel_ him. Chris hadn’t realized how consumed he’d been by it until the threat was no longer there.

That Tom was ready to join with him physically, that his heart had made its precious choice, was an honor and a privilege and a victory of the sort Chris had never tasted.

He sat up on his elbows. “I won’t hurt you.”

Tom’s teeth shone brightly when he smiled. “I know you won’t.”

There was oil in a container Chris had procured from a Chinese lady at one of the shops in town. He’d kept it under the bed wrapped in an old pair of boots, and now reached for it, letting it tumble onto the bed. Tom eyed it a little nervously but lay down against the pillows as Chris rose above him. Chris usually slept in the nude, but he’d been keeping a pair of flannel pajama bottoms on so that Tom wouldn’t feel even a flicker of nervousness around him. He tugged them down now, watching as Tom’s gaze fell low to his crotch, low to his thighs, all the way down to the tips of his toes, swallowing loudly. Tom’s ankle had healed nicely, the swelling gone and only a faint lavender tint to his skin that would soon disappear entirely. The bullet graze and the cut to this clavicle were still scabbed but shrinking with each passing day. Soon they would be only lines of pale pink on his white skin, forgotten.

“Lift this, babe,” Chris said, taking the hem of Tom’s nightgown and tugging it up. Tom helped him, raising his arms and letting the garment fall to the floor like a tuft of cake cream.

“Kiss me,” Tom whispered, lifting his chin, hands curving over Chris’s shoulders. They rested back against the pillows, Chris blanketing him evenly, their bodies pressed from thighs to lips, noses bumping. Roving his hands down the silky skin of Tom’s waist, Chris pecked and nipped and left a trail of kisses from Tom’s chin to navel, adoring the thin patch of hair on his chest and the freckles that lined in crooked constellations Tom’s bare skin, a canvas for which Chris could trace his way to the stars.

Lying nude, lean and long, Tom watched him through the thick brush of his lashes, his own fingers skimming faintly over his jumping chest, tiny breaths that showed how excited he was, how nervous. Chris left warm, moist kisses on each hipbone, dragging his lips to the soft inner meat of pale thighs, breathing there and gazing as the fine brown hairs that trembled in chills. Tom’s scent rose from his core, his cock filling and rising. And when Chris put his mouth to the lightly furred sac, Tom’s back arched delicately, eyes stuck to Chris as if he were the sun and Tom’s entire life was cast in darkness. He mouthed and moaned and inhaled, tongue flicking out to tease and roll the balls into his mouth, sucking at them and letting them drop with a delicious bounce.

Tom’s hands strayed to his nipples, where he pinched at them and gently kneaded, almost subconsciously, so entrenched in his pleasure that he moved and reacted on pure instinct, in a place with no room for doubt or questions or fear or anger or pain. Those days for him were done. Here he would drown in the love Chris could give, and the pleasures with which their bodies could burgeon.

With a hand, Chris lifted Tom’s leg at the thigh, scissoring his legs open and exposing him utterly. Tom’s eyes widened, but he said nothing, only took a measured breath and let his leg fall open on its own. Chris ducked his chin and sought the hidden warmth deeper between the cleft of Tom’s bottom, the hole smooth and pink and sweetly hairless. Long fingers crept low and wrapped around the balls hanging heavily, Tom cupping himself, massaging, watching. Chris’s blood lit with flame and he bent to close his mouth over Tom’s entrance.

Tom hissed, hips undulating, his other hand sliding into Chris’s hair and tugging. From the light of the lamp, Chris could see tears glistening in his eyes, one slipping free and disappearing into the pillowcase.

He was clean and he was vibrating, his body opening up to Chris through kiss and tongue, gentle prodding, an offering. By the time Chris dipped his fingers in the oil, Tom’s limbs were loose and pliant, spread wide on the bed. Still, with one finger and then two, he stretched him and nibbled, slathering him wet. Three fingers, four. Tom writhed and moaned, gasping with every plunge, eyes shooting open as if sparks lit within.

Hard and leaking, Chris rose from his crouch and crawled over Tom, planting himself flat and smothering him in more kisses. Tom found the oil and almost blindly, smeared more on Chris’s cock, his small, soft hand nearly bringing Chris near to bursting.

“Hold still, love,“ he said, angling his hips low and keeping Tom’s thighs open. Broad tip, spongy head, he pressed in slowly. Brows gathered, fingers clawed into Chris’s forearms, Tom whined. Neck strained high, he kept his eyes on where their bodies were slowly coming together, teeth set in a hard edge.

“Easy, little bird,” Chris whispered, nudging his hairline, embracing him with one arm, the other holding Tom’s knee wide.

“I’m okay,” Tom moaned. “I’m okay, don’t stop.”

Letting him gather his breath for a moment, Chris pushed in again, inch by inch, absorbing the sporadic trembling Tom’s body endured. His skin was so pale and creamy, not a single bruise evident.

“You’re so beautiful. Can I call you mine? My little bird?”

“Yes,” Tom breathed, voice thick with tears, peppering Chris’s face with kisses. “I thought you knew, since the beginning, my darling. Haven’t it? That I’m yours?”

With one exhalation, Chris moaned his named and pressed himself the last crucial bit, filling Tom to the root, a steady pulsing deep inside him. Propped up on both arms, Chris tried to quell his shaking but it was hard to hear past the ringing in his ears, his vision winking at the tight sheath of Tom’s body, the _heat_.

“My darling,” Tom said, carding his fingers through Chris’s long hair. Chris grunted and snapped his hips forward still, embedded completely. But Tom shot a smile up at the ceiling, head tossed back, all bobbing throat and Chris’s name like a prayer on his tongue. Dragging his hips back, Chris started a slow and measured rhythm, memorizing every gasped word, every eye roll, every flutter of long lashes. Awash in the sensations, Tom began to moan a little louder, hands clawed at his back, hips moving forward as Chris moved back, forward and back, again, a pattern they were happy to sink into.

So many kisses, so many bites and giggles, reddened skin, love bruises rising, hair matted with sweat. Here, the wind whistled against the house, the surf crashed and abated, and the stars rose like birds in flight, like doves in the desert dark they’d left behind.

Tom’s climax was loud and monumental, the flush of blood screaming under his skin, spine arching, arching, colliding with Chris, both pushing and pulling, a violent elegance and consummation, a joining of spirits.

Floating, eyes rolling into his head, Tom bounced limply under Chris’s thrusts, trembling fingers only barely managing to hold Chris by the forearms, all slicked skin and soft hairs of spun gold.

Tummy coiling, balls rising, Chris pumped into Tom a little harder. Dipping his head, he kissed the sensitive skin behind Tom’s ear and felt his orgasm burst over him, his seed spilling into sweet warmth of Tom’s body. He groaned and dug his nose into Tom’s curls, snapping his hips in again, deep, he wanted deep.

Their bodies began to cool, the sweat to glisten in the golden light of the oil lamp, and Tom worshipped him with his name. When Chris slipped out, a puddle of spend spilled to the sheets. But they hardly noticed, crowding together under the blanket and folding themselves in as tight a knot as possible. Outside, the wind began to howl a little louder, the moon disappeared behind a gathering of clouds, and the stars ringed themselves a little closer.

**Tom:**

In the blissful months that followed, Tom learned where to buy the freshest groceries, which tailor would mend their clothes cheaply but expertly, and how long winter lasted before the first seagulls returned from the northern climes to summer in the south. Chris had made love to him every night and day since that first time, on every surface in their home, with both aggression and gentleness, his love the most profound truth Tom had ever known. Panic would set in less and less frequently, even if certain positions sometimes made it spike – such as when Chris took him from behind. But while other men had hurt him cruelly, Chris saturated him with affection and simple, exquisite pleasure.

The Madame was dead.

In his more distraught moments, those times he would wake at night thinking it was some other man holding him, or worse, that the Madame was only a foot away ready to spear him with her vulture-head parasol, Tom would think on his time at Silver Dam as if under the cloudy blanket of a dream. A terrible one, yes, but something he wasn’t entirely sure had happened. It was his mind trying to protect him from the worst of the pain, he figured, his memories of the men in the dark rooms no more than flickering shadows on a wall. All of his physical memories were being eclipsed by his experience with Chris, whose body and scent and weight and heat were as familiar to him now as the patch of skin on his own wrist, that smell we remember from our childhood. With every coupling, Tom forgot the ones he’d been forced to endure under the abuse of the Madame, his memories of the acrid scent of smoke and tobacco, of unwashed bodies, of cruel words and threatening fists – they began to scatter with the seawind that graced their home every morning.

The Madame was dead, and he was finally beginning to accept the role she’d played in the last half year of his life. In a way, his lack of control had prepared him, quietly and subtly, to exert the kind of control he could feel beginning to grow in Chris’s presence and the environment of their new home. Before, he had been under the tutelage and command of his parents who, without being cruel or spiteful, had still owned him to an extent. That ownership had transferred to the Madame, in the sobering and terrifying world she had ruled over in the Sapphire Raven.

She had been about to kill him, and Chris had taken the chance to end her life. Tom could never fully express his gratitude. If Tom had escaped and she had continued living in Silver Dam, he would have worried about the fates of the girls in her charge would have been a dark cloud over every day in his new life with Chris in California. But his fears were luckily unfounded as Eve’s letters began to arrive, explaining just how much everything had changed at the Sapphire Raven. The Madame’s disappearance had indeed been noted, but her body had never been found. Most presumed she had left one night and never returned, taking her fortune to start anew elsewhere. Eve, in her intelligent and kind way, had taken over the affairs of the business almost immediately. She still ran the saloon and the card tables, but was slowly whittling down the flesh trade from the establishment. The girls had taken on a different sort of entertainment, performing dramas on the stage Eve had instructed be built where the side staircase had led from the main parlor floor to the second floor rooms. In order to acclimate the patrons to the lack of sexual services, the girls performed semi-nude, songs and skits that had the crowd roaring with laughter, bristling with quiet tension, every single girl blushing rosily with surprise at the thunderous applause every night. Eve hoped she would be able to incorporate fully clothed dramas in the near future, but she was careful with the delicate hold she had on the business. The dark rooms were washed and scrubbed and converted into rooms where the girls would learn letters and numbers, everything secret. Educating the girls would be scandalous enough, but stopping the flesh trade entirely was a serious adjustment that required time and delicacy.

“’I’ve searched out your Belen,’” Tom read from one of Eve’s letters. “’She is a stalwart little beauty, isn’t she? Invited me right in and sat me at her kitchen table and fed me. She smokes like a man and spits out the window, but I can see just why you love her. She is a storm, and I feel safer knowing she’s just down the road.’”

“She’s a storm, alright,” Chris agreed, chuckling as he whittled another figurine from a bleached piece of driftwood Tom had recovered one afternoon. There was a collection of them scattered through the house, adorning every windowsill, birds and butterflies and slender little deer.

“She’s the moon,” Tom said softly, remembering what Belen had told him the night they escaped Silver Dam. They’d exchanged several letters with the old boardinghouse owner, where she admitted that she’d been somewhat adopted by the girls from the Sapphire Raven, inviting her to the shows and visiting with her in her warm kitchen, where she was teaching them to cook. “I’m so happy they have each other. I didn’t want to leave them. And I wanted to bring them all with us away from that place. It seemed so impossible.”

“We all have our corners in this world,” Chris said softly. “Supporting each other, you know they’ll be just fine now that the Madame isn’t there.”

Tom nodded glumly, missing Eve so much. He still wore her scarves, and some of the dresses that she’d given him just before he left. He didn’t want to forget the way she smelled.

He fingered the necklace hanging down his chest, a gift Chris had presented to him shortly after settling in their new home.

“I buried them,” he had said softly, rocking on a twinset of chairs he’d purchased off the weathered old carpenter who kept his shop just off the main square of town. Tom sat right beside him, their hands dangling between, fingers laced.

Tom’s heart gave a little jump. “Them?”

“Your parents. I followed in the direction you said you’d come from. And I found them. And I buried them.”

Tears rose in Tom’s eyes, blurring Chris and the fluttering red eye of his lit cigarette. He swallowed and sat up, turning to face him. “Were they…?” Okay? Destroyed? Was there anything even there? “How were they?”

Chris gave a soft sigh, eyes on the shoreline. “They were decent, love. But they were bones. Clothed still. They’re in the earth where we all belong.”

Wiping at the falling tears, Tom nodded and thanked him quietly, his guilty grief at their passing lessened now that he knew they’d been properly buried. At the time, he hadn’t had the strength to do it himself. And it had cut him a little more each day knowing they were out there under the ravishing sun.

“I found something,” Chris said, digging into his pocket and pulling out a gold chain. Tom recognized it immediately.

“It’s my mother’s,” he whispered, reaching for it. He had thought the last he would see anything of hers was the day he nearly died in the desert.

“It was tangled in her hair. Broken and hidden from the scavengers. I was able to get it mended. It should hold.” He nodded gruffly and turned back to the sea, casting Tom a nervous glance, as if anxious for his response. “Thought you would want it.”

“I do,” Tom said quickly, nodding fast. “I do. I have nothing of theirs. And she wore this every day. A gift from my father when they first started courting years ago. He called her his dove, and this was supposed to signify their love.”

His face crumpled and he jumped from his chair to where Chris sat, curling on his lap and whispering his thank you’s, kissing him hard, gold chain dangling from his clenched fist.

And now he wore it every day, its cool weight dangling under his shirt as he washed their clothes and cooked their food and rode Bullet down the beach and back. And Chris was always there, helping him with the meals, carrying the load of clothes as Tom hung them up to dry, kneeling beside him on the ground where Tom had started to plant seeds of flowers and lines of tomatoes in the dark, rich fertilizer they’d packed into one side of the yard. The flowers started to bloom, and the tomatoes to ripen and redden, and white shells to dot along their beach as the seas shifted. Summer was winding to a close.

“We’ll freeze!” Tom laughed as he jumped under the covers and twisted himself into a ball.

“Where’s my little bird?” Chris said, pawing through the sheets after him. “Where’s my bird? Hiding in his nest? Where is he?”

Tom’s face appeared in the bundle, grinning wide, already reaching for him. Chris dragged him up and they collapsed in a tangle, lips slotting together like the most familiar thing.

“You’ll keep me warm, won’t you, my darling?”

Chris hummed at his throat, already mouthing down past the scar at his clavicles and down to his navel.

“Yes,” Tom breathed. “The cold will do nothing to us.”

Rising, Chris caught his mouth and pinched his bottom lip with his teeth, a sure way to speed Tom’s heart.

“Not anymore, my bird,” he whispered.

And Tom clasped him close, squeezing him hard, with adoring relish. “No, not anymore.”

 

End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate everyone's kindness. Thank you for reading <3


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